Multiple nations and private entities are pushing to make landing humans on Mars a reality. The majority of proposed mission architectures envision ‘living off the land’ by leveraging Martian water-ice deposits for fuel production and other purposes. Fortunately for mission designers, water ice exists on Mars in plentiful volumes. The challenge is isolating accessible ice deposits within regions that optimize other preferred landing-site conditions. Here we present the first results of the Mars Subsurface Water Ice Mapping (SWIM) project, which has the aim of searching for buried ice resources across the mid-latitudes. Through the integration of orbital datasets in concert with new data-processing techniques, the SWIM project assesses the likelihood of ice by quantifying the consistency of multiple, independent data sources with the presence of ice. Concentrating our efforts across the majority of the northern hemisphere, our composite ice-consistency maps indicate that the broad plains of Arcadia and the extensive glacial networks across Deuteronilus Mensae match the greatest number of remote-sensing criteria for accessible ice-rich, subsurface material situated equatorwards of the contemporary ice-stability zone.

多个国家和私人实体正在努力使人类在火星上着陆成为现实。大多数拟议的任务架构都设想通过利用火星的水冰沉积物来生产燃料和其他目的来“脱离土地”。对于任务设计者而言幸运的是，火星上有大量冰块。挑战在于在可优化其他首选着陆点条件的区域内隔离可及的冰层。在这里，我们展示了火星地下水冰测绘（SWIM）项目的第一批结果，该项目的目的是在中纬度地区寻找地下冰源。通过整合轨道数据集和新的数据处理技术，SWIM项目通过量化多个冰点的一致性来评估冰的可能性，有冰存在的独立数据源。综合我们在北半球大部分地区的努力，我们的综合冰稠度图表明，阿卡迪亚的广阔平原和整个Deuteronilus Mensae的广泛的冰川网络符合最大的遥感标准，适用于可获取的富含冰的地下物质当代冰稳定区的赤道。