How to Mine Water on Mars

Pockets of water ice on the southern pole of Mars, such as these, have been stopped from their once-routine migration by a cap of dry ice, or frozen carbon dioxide. 

Planetary scientists think the migrations was fueled by an eccentric wobble in Mars'tilt. 

Credit: ESA

The bone-dry desert of present-day Mars may seem like the last place you would look for water, but the Red Planet actually contains a wealth of water locked up in ice.

Evidence that Mars once supported liquid water has been mounting for years, and exploratory missions have found that water ice still exists on the planet's poles and just beneath its dusty surface.

Accessing that water could require digging it up and baking it in an oven, or beaming microwaves at the soil and extracting the water vapor.

Yet no mission has attempted to extract water on Mars or any celestial body beyond Earth in appreciable quantities.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander inserted the four needles of its thermal and conductivity probe into Martian soil during the 98th Martian day, or sol, of the mission and left it in place until Sol 99 (Sept. 4, 2008). 

The Robotic Arm Camera on Phoenix took this image on the morning of Sol 99 while the probe's needles were in the ground. The science team informally named this soil target "Gandalf."

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Max Planck InstituteView full size image

Now, the Netherlands-based organization Mars One, which wants to establish a permanent human settlement on the Red Planet, is planning to send an unmanned lander to Mars in 2018 that would carry an experiment to demonstrate that water extraction is possible. Mined water could be used for drinking, growing plants or creating fuel.

"Here on Earth, we've experimented with different technologies to extract moisture out of the atmosphere or soil," said Ed Sedivy, civil space chief engineer at the security and aerospace company Lockheed Martin and program manager for NASA's Phoenix lander flight system.

The question is, Sedivy said, "At the concentration of water we're likely to encounter and the temperatures we're likely to encounter [on Mars], how do we validate those technologies are appropriate?"