For long time, the story and puzzle about Planet Mars keep shifting from the facts that, no conclusion has ever been made on what exactly happened or will.
Scientists have on recent days have confirmed that there is water ice on Mars, and not just a little — it’s a huge frozen mound inside a crater called Korolev Crater.
This crater is about 82 kilometers wide and sits in the northern lowlands of Mars. At first glance, it looks like a snowy field, but it’s actually solid ice.
The ice in the crater is up to 1.8 kilometers thick and stays frozen all year. That’s thanks to a natural “cold trap” — the crater is shaped in a way that keeps the air inside cold. The floor of the crater is deep (about 2 kilometers), and that depth helps cool the air above the ice. This cold air sits in place and blocks warmer air from coming in and melting the ice.
These beautiful images of the icy crater were taken by the Mars Express spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mars since 2003.
The crater is named after Sergei Korolev, the Russian scientist who helped launch the first satellite (Sputnik) and the first human into space.
Other space missions, like ExoMars, are also studying this region to see if there’s any sign that life may have once existed on Mars.
In 2018, one of their orbiters got a crystal-clear image of the icy rim, showing just how impressive and important this discovery is.
