Mars astronauts could live in this mysterious ‘pit’

Strange holes in the surface of our neighboring planet could one day provide areas where astronauts can take shelter.

A mysterious pit on Mars captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has reignited interest in the potential of these features to support future human missions to the Red Planet.

The pit, which is only a few meters wide, is located on the slopes of the Martian volcano Arsia Mons, and is one of many holes on the planet that could lead to larger underground caverns. These wells could therefore potentially provide protection against the planet’s high levels of radiation, meteorite impacts and extreme temperatures, making them suitable for human habitation.

NASA’s MRO first imaged this particular well on August 15, 2022, from an altitude of 155 miles above the surface of Mars. It is one of the many volcanoes on the flanks of the three major volcanoes in the Tharsis region.

Scientists are unsure whether this pit is a narrow vertical shaft, such as those found on Hawaiian volcanoes, or whether it opens into a more extensive cave or ancient lava tube, formed when the volcano was active.

‘There’s more than one [pits] on Mars that we have seen. But they are really interesting because they are places where astronauts can go and are safe from radiation,” Brandon Johnson, a geophysicist at Purdue University, told Business Insider.

Mars has no global magnetic field and has a thin atmosphere, which provides little protection against space radiation, which is between 40 and 50 times higher than on Earth, posing significant risks to human health. These pits, which may open into larger caverns, could provide a solution by providing a natural shield against radiation.

“On Earth, these lava tubes can be large enough to walk around in, but they can also be small and the voids can be discrete or discontinuous,” Ross Beyer, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute, told Business Insider. “So these pits we’re seeing could open into larger caverns, or they could just be isolated pits. There’s no way of knowing what’s inside until we examine them in more detail.”

The pits may therefore also have astrobiological significance, as subsurface environments in Mars’ past could have provided a stable, protected habitat for microbial life. Some wells on the moon have been found to maintain a temperature of about 63 degrees Fahrenheit, suggesting that similar conditions could exist on Mars.

“This is a good place to look, but we don’t know if there is life on Mars at all,” Johnson said.

While the potential of these wells is promising, significant challenges still remain as current orbital images provide only limited views of the depths of these formations, making it difficult to determine their exact structure and extent.

“Unfortunately, there is a limit to the ‘angle’ we can get from space to look ‘inside’ these wells. So sometimes we can see ‘walls’ and sometimes we can’t,” Beyer said.

Future missions may require deploying aerial rovers or drones that can descend into the wells to collect detailed data.

“There have been missions proposed to essentially have a robot go on a line and drop into one of these skylights and be able to explore what’s inside,” Johnson said.

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