The Odds of Finding Water on Mars

Mars has plenty of water, and almost all of it is in the wrong place. The poles are rich in ice, the equator, where you would actually want to land, has none within reach. That leaves the mid-latitudes, and until now the honest answer about what lies beneath them has been a bit of a shrug. Two new studies from the Planetary Science Institute have changed the shape of that answer. Rather than simply asking whether the data are consistent with buried ice, they have started calculating the odds and can now say, of a given patch of Martian ground, that there is a 64 per cent chance of finding ice if you dig there.