Lynn Carter

Sharad's also discovered mid-latitude ice, like a lot of ice that we didn't know was there.

This ice is perhaps more interesting for the exploration side because the poles are really hard environments to get to.

There's a lot of seasonal deposition of ice.

For example, we sent one spacecraft near the poles and we now have a picture of it under the ice, partially, during the winter.

And it's been basically crushed by the ice that's deposited every year, and then some made it off.

So if you're going to send astronauts or long-term surface rovers or something, then you want to go to mid or low latitudes.

And so this work that I'm showing here is by Allie Bramson.

She's a graduate student here in the department.

And she's worked a lot with the Charade team.

part of our team now.

So what she noticed was that this is another profile, and it's over the mid-latitudes of Mars, so like 50 degrees.

And this is a really extensive deposit.

And she also noticed that it corresponded to these kind of weird craters.

And this is a crater digital terrain model from the HiRISE camera.

So there's different layers.

And there's this floor terrace, and then it ramps up, and then there's this wall terrace up here.

these kind of odd craters, people think that their morphology occurs because you have a subsurface ice layer.

And so when you have an impact into that layer, it creates this weird shape.

where you kind of have a double wall.

So there's some evidence that there is ice there.