Astronauts on Mars could live in this mysterious pit

Strange holes in the surface of our neighboring planet may one day provide areas where astronauts can hide.

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

The hole, which is only a few feet in diameter, is located on the slopes of the Martian volcano Arsia Mons and is one of many such holes on the planet that can lead to larger underground caverns. These pits could therefore provide protection from the planet’s high radiation levels, meteorite impacts and extreme temperatures, making them suitable for human habitation.

NASA MRO first imaged this particular crater on August 15, 2022, from 159 miles above the Martian surface. It is one of many found on the slopes of the three great volcanoes of the Tharsis region.

Scientists aren’t sure if the pit is a narrow vertical shaft — like those found in Hawaiian volcanoes — or if it opens into a larger cave or an ancient lava tube formed when the volcano was active.

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

Mars lacks a global magnetic field and has a thin atmosphere that offers little protection from cosmic rays, which are 40 to 50 times higher than on Earth and pose a significant risk to human health. These pits, which potentially open into larger caverns, could offer a solution by providing a natural shield against radiation.

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

Therefore, the pits may also have astrobiological significance, as the subsurface environment may have provided a stable, protected environment for microbial life in Mars’ past. Some craters on the moon have been found to maintain temperatures around 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’s even life on Mars,” Johnson said.

While the potential of these pits is promising, significant challenges remain as current orbital imagery provides limited views into 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 orbit to look ‘into’ these dimples. So sometimes we can see the ‘walls’ and sometimes we can’t,” Beyer said.

Future missions may need to deploy rovers or aerial drones capable of descending into pits to obtain detailed data.

“Missions are designed to basically have the 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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