Subsurface Ice is EVERYWHERE!

This map shows five locations where fresh impact cratering has excavated water ice from just beneath the Surface of Mars (sites 1 through 5) and the Viking Lander 2 Landing Site (VL2), in the context of color coding to indicate estimated depth to ice.

The map covers an area from 40 to 60° North Latitude and from 130 to 190° East Longitude. Estimates of the depth to water-ice come from a computer model and observations of the brightness and temperature of the Surface. The model matches the ice-exposing crater observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and data from the neutron spectrometer on NASA's Mars Odyssey Orbiter.

Analysis of the observations of ice-exposing fresh craters at sites 1 through 5, reported by Byrne et al. in a Sept. 25, 2009, paper in the journal Science, leads the paper's authors to calculate that if NASA's Viking Lander 2 had been able to dig slightly deeper than the 10-to 15-centimeter-deep (4-to-6-inch-deep) trench that it excavated in 1976, it would have hit water ice.

The color coding indicates depths to the top of a water-ice-containing layer, ranging from 1 cm (about 0,5") in dark-blue coded locations to 10 meters (33 feet) in red-coded locations.