Thick layer of water ice found below the surface of Mars

New Delhi : Scientists have been making claims over finding signs of life on Mars for quite some time now. In a latest, researchers have located a thick layer of clean water ice under the surface of the Red Planet.

The report, by Wired, claims that it is not sure how pure this ice is or in what form it is present in.

Due to lack of instruments on the Red Planet, scientists can only dig up to few centi-meters and can only test surface for few meters. But earlier, there have been several spots on the planet which indicated presence of water on the planet.

The frozen water found in these sites are mineable, according to this week's issue of Science.

It is expected that the layer of ice on Red planet surface can be found from 1 meter to 100 meters of depth. NASA scientists believe that the ice closer to the surface could be quite pure and should be easy to extract as well.

Richard Zurek, chief scientist for the Mars Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in an interview with Wired that "On Mars, when you see something bright, it usually means ice. And the spectrometer readings support that this is water ice and not ice-cemented soil, which would be much harder to convert into water as a resource."