00:00Recently, scientists have made an astounding discovery that can change the entire course of Mars exploration.
00:07Apparently, there are oceans of liquid water on the Red Planet.
00:11So, the future looks bright.
00:13We could use this water to support future missions, and then even relocate to Mars,
00:18since we wouldn't need to worry about where to get this precious liquid, right?
00:23Well, there's one big problem.
00:25Well, these oceans of liquid water are in Mars, so deep inside that we aren't likely to get there.
00:31At least, that's what a new analysis of seismic data collected by the Mars Inside Lander claims.
00:37Huge reserves of liquid water seem to be the best explanation for some seismic quirks of the Red Planet.
00:44So, all this precious water is out of our reach.
00:48But we need to find it to solve the puzzle of the aquatic history of our blushing, dusty neighbor.
00:53And the first thing we need to do is identify where the water is and how much of it the planet is hiding.
01:01Navigation has confirmed that the parachute has deployed, and we're seeing significant deceleration.
01:06Now, our rovers are scurrying about on the surface of the Red Planet,
01:10gathering all the available data on the planet's surface geology.
01:14And it's getting increasingly obvious that Mars was once covered with water.
01:19Many factors, from Martian terrains to ancient dry lakebeds and deltas,
01:24suggest that there was a time when the planet was quite soppy.
01:29These days, there's still some water on and right below the surface of Mars.
01:33But it's in the form of ice, and nowhere near what Mars had in the ancient past.
01:38To understand how much of it could have been on the Red Planet billions of years ago,
01:42we must know where all this water went.
01:46There are two spots where the water could have gone – into space or toward the interior of Mars.
01:53Then it could have been isolated, as either liquid reservoirs or ice deposits.
01:58Currently, we don't have any way of measuring how much water once leaked away.
02:03But now, we finally can find out more about the gooey center of the Red Planet.
02:08All thanks to the Mars InSight lander.
02:11It isn't operating anymore.
02:13But from November 2018 to December 2022,
02:17it was listening to the hums and rumbles and monitoring the activity below its feet.
02:26The thing is, acoustic waves generated by seismic activity deep inside the planet
02:32can change according to the composition and density of the material these waves are moving through.
02:38And scientists can get a lot of information analyzing the behavior of seismic waves.
02:43In this case, they used a model similar to those used to map underground oil fields and aquifers on our home planet.
02:51Then, with the help of this model, they analyzed the data gathered by InSight on Mars.
02:57They discovered that the best explanation could be that there was a layer of fractured rocks
03:02whose cracks were filled with water deep under the surface of the Red Planet.
03:06That layer could be at a depth of 7 to 12 miles.
03:11That's why it would be extremely tricky for future missions to get to it.
03:15And still, the new discovery could help us understand the Martian water cycle.
03:20Confirming the existence of a large reservoir of liquid water
03:23can help us sneak a peek at what the climate on Mars used to be
03:27or what it could be like one day.
03:30And if once, Mars had a lot of water.
03:34It could have been habitable in the ancient past and might become habitable in the future.
03:40Water is crucial for life as we know it.
03:42So, underground water reservoirs on the Red Planet could already be habitable.
03:48Maybe, while we're talking, tiny microorganisms or even some tentacled creatures
03:53are living their lives in the comfort of their underground home.
03:56On Earth, super-deep mines do host life.
04:00And the bottom of the ocean, with its immense, unbelievable pressures, isn't lifeless either.
04:06So far, we haven't found any evidence of life on Mars.
04:10But for now, it sounds like this place has the potential to sustain life.
04:16Insight data has shown that there isn't likely to be a lot of water ice in the upper crust of the planet,
04:21at least in the region around the lander.
04:24But if it turns out that there is a water-rich layer deep below the surface
04:29and stretching around the entire globe of the planet,
04:32then there would be enough water to fill ancient ocean beds and even more.
04:39Now, Mars isn't the only place outside Earth where there is water
04:42or where we might one day find water.
04:45Take the good old moon, for example.
04:47On Earth's natural satellite, water can be found all over the surface.
04:51But it's not the water you might be imagining.
04:54On the Moon, water remains mostly as ice, and is distributed unevenly.
05:00For example, the poles of the Moon are the regions that never receive sunlight.
05:04This is the reason they're extremely cold.
05:07And it's no wonder there's a lot of ice there.
05:10The ice in these areas is often mixed with the lunar soil and hiding deep below the surface.
05:15Then there's Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn.
05:19In reality, it's not that large, just 314 miles across.
05:24In other words, this moon is small enough to fit inside Arizona.
05:28Ooh, we should try that.
05:30Well, interestingly, when the Cassini space probe first arrived at Saturn,
05:35researchers were expecting Enceladus to be a frozen ball of ice.
05:39But what they saw was plumes of icy particles and water vapor erupting from geysers on the Moon's surface.
05:45It was clear that there was a massive ocean between the Moon's rocky core and its icy shell.
05:53Then there's Jupiter's Moon Europa.
05:56Scientists think that this world is one of the most promising places in the solar system
06:00when it comes to searching for new life forms.
06:03That's because Europa has a huge saltwater ocean as deep as 40 to 100 miles.
06:09And even though it's under a layer of ice that is likely to be 10 to 20 miles thick,
06:14it's still potentially habitable.
06:17Astronomers believe that plumes of water might erupt from cracks in the ice shell
06:21and release the contents of the Moon's ocean into space.
06:25The temperature, pressure, and chemistry are very different on Europa.
06:30And astronomers aren't sure yet how the ice behaves there.
06:34That's the main reason they haven't figured out yet
06:36how deep or large the water reservoirs on Europa are
06:39and how long they need to refreeze.
06:42But out of all the places where we could find water in the universe,
06:47the most bizarre is probably open space.
06:50In 2011, two teams of astronomers discovered a cloud of water floating freely among stars.
06:57It was the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected.
07:01So this massive cloud of water vapor surrounds a black hole.
07:06But not just any black hole.
07:08This one's a quasar located 12 billion light-years from Earth.
07:12The conditions around this quasar must be really special
07:15to create such an enormous amount of water.
07:18This cloud contains 140 trillion times the volume of all the water on Earth.
07:24That's enough to give every person on the planet
07:26a whole planet's worth of water 20,000 times over.
07:30Sounds wild, doesn't it?
07:32But there's something even cooler.
07:34Astronomers think this water cloud formed just 1.6 billion years after the universe began.
07:40This discovery is yet another sign
07:42that water has been around all over the universe, even in its early days.
07:47But here's the kicker.
07:49Until they found this, scientists had never detected water vapor so far back in time.
07:55Sure, there's water in our Milky Way galaxy, but most of it's frozen solid in ice.
08:00This discovery really pushes the boundaries of what we know about water in the universe.
08:05As we saw, the darkness, the universe is
08:16the only one that's placed in
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