Water on Mars

Nasa's made this great find, that there's enough water on Mars to cover the planet, to actually make a planetary sea.

 

MARK COLVIN: There's little in outer space that fires the imagination more than the possibility of life on Mars.
For life there needs to be water, and the latest news from NASA is that there is plenty of that.
A new radar that's measured ice deposits on Mars indicates that there's enough frozen water there to cover the entire planet to a depth of about 11 metres.
The find doesn't bring us any closer to knowing whether there was life on Mars, but it has revived the hopes of some that there could be life on the planet in the future, as Paula Kruger reports.
PAULA KRUGER: It has long been seen as the dry, dusty red planet.
But the latest discovery is pouring a lot of cold water, or, more correctly, ice on that belief.
In a joint effort by NASA, the Italian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency's Mars Express Spacecraft, scientists have discovered the frozen mass on Mars' South Pole is more than three and a half kilometres deep.
Dr Jonathan Clarke is an associate at Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University. He says the find is a welcomed surprise.
JONATHAN CLARKE: Well, people have known about the layer deposits at the pole regions of Mars for a very long time, since the early 70s. Some very spectacular satellite images have been acquired from various missions since then, but we haven't really known what they've been made of. People have suggested there've been layers of dust or layers of ice mixed with dust, or other materials. What this recent finding shows is that they are almost pure water ice, at least 90 per cent pure, which is really very amazing and quite unexpected.

Roll on hte terraforming project!