don’t see it because most of it is mixed with the soil which we call regolith on Mars.

So the Martian soil can be anywhere from as little as one percent in some very dry deserty

like areas to as much as 60 percent water. So one strategy for getting water when you’re

on Mars is to break up the regolith which would take something like a jackhammer because

it’s very cold, it’s very frozen. If you can imagine making a frozen brick or a chunk

of ice that’s mostly soil and maybe half water and half soil that’s what you would

be dealing with. So you need to break this up, put it in an oven. As it heats up it turns

to steam. You run it through a distillation tube and you have pure drinking water that

comes out the other end. There is a much easier way to get water on Mars. In this country

we have developed industrial dehumidifiers. And they’re very simple machines that simply

blow the air in a room or a building across a mineral called zeolite. Zeolite is very

common on Earth, it’s very common on Mars. And zeolite is kind of like a sponge. It absorbs

water like crazy. Takes the humidity right out of the air. Then you squeeze it and out

comes the water. And scientists working for NASA at the University of Washington as long

ago as in the late 1990s developed a machine called WAVAR that very efficiently sucks water

out of the Martian atmosphere. So water is not nearly as significant a problem that it

appears to be. We also know from orbiters around Mars and right now there are five satellites

orbiting Mars. We know from photographs that these orbiters have taken and geological studies

that they’ve done that there is frozen ice on the surface of Mars. Now there’s tons

of it at the poles. Some of it is overladen with frozen – or mixed with frozen carbon

dioxide. But in many craters on Mars there apparently are sheets of frozen water. So

if early astronauts or early voyagers to Mars were to land near one of those sheets of ice

on a crater they would have all the water they need.