Discovery of mysterious pit near a Martian volcano could provide base for astronauts in future

Humanity has long sought to establish settlements on other planets, and NASA is one step closer to that dream. The colonization of neighboring planets, starting with Mars, may soon become a reality. A mysterious pit near an ancient Martian volcano could provide space explorers with answers about the planet's subsurface, as reported by Live Science.

On August 15, 2022, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured an image of the pit, measuring about 159 miles on the planet's surface. It is not the only hole near the volcano in Mars' Tharsis region. The area once had an inactive volcano called Arsia Mons, and the largest pit appears as a vertical shaft near it. NASA experts are investigating whether it is a shallow pit or leads to a larger cavern under the Martian surface.

Experts are looking into several other pits on the planet that can provide shelter for astronauts in the future. Due to the planet having a thin atmosphere compared to Earth and doesn't have a global magnetic field, Mars is incapable of warding off radiation from space like our planet. The radiation exposure on the surface of Mars can average between 40 and 50 times greater than on Earth, as mentioned in the outlet. The pits might provide solutions to establishing a base for astronauts and help experts unearth astrobiological materials to reveal whether microbial life exists on the Red Planet.

Pictures of some of these Martian pits were taken when the sun was shining high enough to give an impression of the pit wall. The pictures indicated that the pits are unlikely to open into larger caves or tubes. The outlet also shared how these pits can also form when there are tectonic stresses strong enough to fracture a planet's surface and these pits are more likely to lead the researchers to a larger cavern. Also, NASA has provided another explanation "that these pits open up into where underground rivers once flowed billions of years ago." These geological phenomena are also found on Earth and it is called karst.

Karst is formed when the limestone bedrock dissolves and gets weaker. It creates pits and sinkholes that open up into areas of groundwater. The experts suspect that organisms that once thrived on Mars might have sheltered themselves in the karsts and the humid environment would have provided them a safe abode to flourish, per the outlet. NASA has yet to find concrete answers to what lies in the pit or how deep it goes, but its future missions aim to find answers to these questions.

"Scientists think these holes are skylights or places where the ground above the lava tubes has caved in and created a gaping hole in the surface, Brandon Johnson, a geophysicist at Purdue University who studies impact craters throughout the solar system, told Business Insider. "There's more than one of these [pits] on Mars that we've seen. But they're really interesting because they're places where astronauts might be able to go and be safe from radiation." "On the Earth, these lava tubes can be large enough to walk around in, but they can also be small or the voids can be discrete or discontinuous," Ross Beyer, a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute, told the outlet. "So these pits we see could open into larger caves or they could just be isolated pits."