Most of the water on Mars can be consumed, after treatment.

Mars may be our destination as humanity before jumping to those planets, I know this sounds very futuristic, but it is going to happen whether it is Mars or other planets, we are talking about a process that will last centuries, but it will happen, in the same way that humans when they left Africa ended up colonizing all the continents sooner or later with that drive that we have. and that will also happen at least in nearby star systems.

And there is good news, one of the common questions is whether it is possible for colonists who reach Mars or astronauts who reach Mars to drink the water from Martian glaciers, because we know that there is water, but it can be drunk, logically after thawing it and going through a normal filtering process, because the water from terrestrial glaciers is not advisable to drink directly either.

It is used for human consumption, obviously, but after a filtering process, because on Earth glacial water can, sorry, be accompanied by bacteria, some of those bacteria could have remained frozen for thousands of years. Will there be bacteria in the ice of Mars? that is another question.

If we get to Mars, we escape the Martian soil a little and take some ice from a glacier in those subterranean areas that are on Mars, we heat it and filter it. The question is, can we drink that extraterrestrial water, and it turns out that research was recently published in the scientific journal Icarus under the title "Physical properties of underground water ice deposits in the middle latitudes of Mars from surface radar."

The researchers who made this discovery did so thanks to a surface radar instrument aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to analyze five different points on Mars and found a surprising consistency in the purity of the glaciers, that the different glaciers in those five points on the planet had a fairly similar composition and in fact The ice deposits were relatively pure with 80% or more ice.

They are all under a layer of rock and dust and in addition the composition of these glaciers is similar in the two Martian hemispheres, this ice seems to have been formed by ancient snowfalls or also by layers of frost that were superimposed on each other, and this discovery is vital, and the answer to the question is yes, because the large amount of pure water ice that is relatively easy to obtain is just below a thin layer of dust and debris on the Martian surface, not all over it, but in many points of the Martian surface and I'm talking about a few meters.

In some points it may even be less, I mention this because we have photos of small meteorites that impacted the surface of Mars and we see how it has lifted the terrain, but it has also lifted blocks of ice that were below that terrain to very few meters and sometimes less than 1 meter.

The layer of dust and rocks, unfortunately, is inevitable, since water ice cannot be exposed to air on Mars, at least for a long period. We have those photos of those ice blocks outside, but in a few years they will disappear because the ice on the surface of Mars is unstable and sublimates, that is, it goes directly from solid to gas and, yes, it becomes part of the Martian atmosphere as water vapor.

This research transforms Martian water ice into the most valuable resource on the red planet, because with ice it can be used not only for drinking water, also for hygiene, obviously, but also to produce oxygen for breathing, water is H2O, hydrogen and oxygen, hydrogen can also be used for rocket fuel through an electrolysis process, it is a fairly simple process, the only thing you need is electrical energy and this could make long-term missions and the colonization of Mars much easier.

Grow food too, not only because it can be irrigated, but Martian soils contain perchlorates, something that, by the way, some regions of the Earth affected by mining pollution also have, such as areas of California, western Texas or northern Chile, although on Mars the concentrations are higher, these perchlorate compounds are a problem for human health, so before using the Martian soil to grow potatoes, for example, it would have to be cleaned and the easiest method is to use water. Perchlorates leave with the water and then the water is contaminated, but it can be decontaminated with bioremediation processes and membrane processes.

To recycle that contaminated water are processes that we know, they are not expensive and the only thing you need is an energy source, be it solar panels on Mars, with the dust it may not be the best idea, fusion reactors or whatever energy source is available at that time, but we have water.

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