Mars has its own version of the Grand Canyon, and scientists have learned this dramatic feature is home to "significant amounts of water" after a discovery made by an orbiter circling the red planet, according to the European Space Agency(ESA), CNN reported.

The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, launched in 2016 as a joint mission between the European Space Agency and Roscosmos, detected the water in Valles Marineris on Mars. This canyon system is 10 times longer, five times deeper and 20 times wider than the Grand Canyon.

The water is located beneath the surface of the canyon system and was detected by the orbiter's FREND instrument, or Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector. This instrument is able to map hydrogen in the top meter (3.28 feet) of Martian soil.

Most water on Mars is located in the planet's polar regions and remains frozen as water ice. Valles Marineris is just south of the planet's equator, where temperatures typically aren't cold enough for water ice to remain.

The observations were collected by the orbiter between May 2018 to February 2021. Previously, other orbiters have searched for water just beneath the Martian surface and detected small amounts under Martian dust. A study detailing the findings was published in the journal Icarus.

To put that into perspective, this area is about the size of the Netherlands. It overlaps with Candor Chaos, a network of valleys within the canyon system.
The FREND instrument searches for neutrons to map hydrogen content in the Martian soil.

There are higher temperatures near the equator on Mars, so the researchers believe there must be some special blend of conditions that allow the water to remain and be replenished.

Future missions to Mars will land at lower latitudes. This discovery in Valles Marineris highlights the feature as an intriguing place for potential human exploration in the years ahead, especially because this water would be much more accessible than other previously discovered subsurface water sources.\

"Knowing more about how and where water exists on present-day Mars is essential to understand what happened to Mars' once-abundant water, and helps our search for habitable environments, possible signs of past life, and organic materials from Mars' earliest days," said Colin Wilson, ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter project scientist, in a statement.