Chilled Out? Ice could lurk beneath Martian equator
By Sid Perkins
Radar observations from a craft orbiting Mars hint that an immense volume of ice-rich material may underlie a vast region along the Red Planet’s equator.
The long, narrow, and disconnected swaths of the Medusae Fossae formation extend about 5,400 kilometers along Mars’ equator, about a quarter of the way around the planet. This undulating landscape occupies the boundary between the cratered highlands of the planet’s southern hemisphere and the lowland plains of the north, says Thomas R. Watters, a planetary scientist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.