Water on Mars found, Congratulations!

MARK COLVIN: David Cooper of the Mars Society, with Paula Kruger.

This is a transcript from PM. The program is broadcast around Australia at 5:10pm on Radio National and 6:10pm on ABC Local Radio.

Mark Colvin presents PM Monday to Friday from 5:10pm on Radio National and 6:10pm on ABC Local Radio. Join Mark for the latest current affairs, wrapping the major stories of each day.

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.

PAULA KRUGER: Dr Jonathan Clarke is also a member of the Mars Society of Australia, which groups together scientists and enthusiasts who research the possibility of putting a permanent human colony on Mars.

The MSA's President, David Cooper, says finding huge deposits of frozen water makes that task a lot easier.

DAVID COOPER: Well, basically it enables humans to live there without taking half their gear with them.

One of the Mars Society's concepts of getting to Mars is a live off the land basic thing, which has since been adopted by NASA as one of their bases of going and putting humans on Mars.

So the idea is to get there and have as much of the material that you need to support life available onsite.

PAULA KRUGER: And so water would be the biggest factor in that equation?

DAVID COOPER: Yes, that's correct. One stage where we were worried about water, we had devised a way of creating water from the atmosphere, but we needed to take hydrogen with us to do that. However, with this much water there it's highly unlikely that they'll have to take hydrogen at all. And, on a typical trip for an 18-month stay, you'd be looking at about eight tonnes of hydrogen going along, or maybe 10 on the flight.

Well, that now means that we could take more scientific gear, or we could take more people, or many other things.

PAULA KRUGER: Why is it that we should want to colonise Mars?

DAVID COOPER: Well, there's many reasons. Before we messed up this planet, what we've done to mess up this planet could make Mars quite habitable. By increasing the temperature on Mars, like we've done earth, we could actually raise the … melt the water and create quite a nice little home, alternative home, for humans.

Though, when you think about the catastrophes that take place on earth, the population problems, the land for farming and all that sort of thing, it makes sense to have your eggs in two baskets instead of one.

PAULA KRUGER: So our flaws on earth would actually work as assets on Mars?

DAVID COOPER: Exactly. You could warm up the carbon dioxide atmosphere by creating pollutants that we do on earth now, and that would, in time, change the temperature level.

It doesn't need a great amount of warmth to start melting the ice caps and that sort of thing and making it habitable.