MIDDLETOWN, Calif. — The Middletown Area Town Hall will discuss its election process this week.
MATH will meet at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 9, in the Middletown Community Meeting Room/Library at 21256 Washington St., Middletown. The meeting is open to the public.
To join the meeting via Zoom click on this link; the meeting ID is 832 1989 2440. Call in at 669-900-6833.
On the agenda is proposed action regarding a candidate forum and the election for seats on the MATH board.
They will review the process and open seats and then open nominations.
MATH’s next meeting will take place on Dec. 14.
The MATH Board includes Chair Monica Rosenthal, Vice Chair Todd Fiora, Secretary Ken Gonzalez, Rosemary Córdova and Bill Waite, and alternates Julia Bono and Tom Darms.
MATH — established by resolution of the Lake County Board of Supervisors on Dec. 12, 2006 — is a municipal advisory council serving the residents of Anderson Springs, Cobb, Coyote Valley (including Hidden Valley Lake), Long Valley and Middletown.
For more information email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has many new dogs and puppies waiting for homes.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Australian shepherd, border collie, boxer, Chihuahua, German shepherd, hound, Labrador retriever, pit bull, shepherd and treeing walker coonhound.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
Those dogs and the others shown on this page at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption.
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
The shelter is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
With the conclusion of daylight saving time arriving this weekend, the California Highway Patrol is reminding motorists how the shift in time and insufficient sleep can affect their ability to drive safely.
Daylight saving time ends this year at 2 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 5.
The CHP joins the National Sleep Foundation in recognizing Nov. 5 to 11 as Drowsy Driving Prevention Week and encourages everyone to prioritize sleep and only drive when they are alert and refreshed.
Although we “fall back” and gain an extra hour of sleep this weekend, it does not necessarily equate to added rest, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
In the fall, people tend to wake up earlier, which results in less sleep throughout the week.
The time change can also disrupt sleep/wake patterns, which can put motorists at an increased risk of crashes.
Every year thousands of crashes occur in California involving drowsy drivers.
According to preliminary data from the CHP’s Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System, or SWITRS, there have been more than 4,000 crashes in California in 2023 involving a drowsy driver.
There were more than 5,000 crashes involving drowsy drivers in each of the two previous years.
Whenever motorists begin to feel tired or fatigued, the CHP reminds motorists to pull safely off the road and use one of the California Department of Transportation’s (Caltrans) statewide roadside rest areas for a quick mind-clearing break.
To find a rest area or to check for the latest travel information on state highways, visit the Caltrans QuickMap at http://quickmap.dot.ca.gov/.
Motorists are advised against stopping on the side of the road where they risk getting hit by another car.
In celebrating the service of U.S. military veterans, California State Parks is offering free admission to 144 select state parks on Veterans Day, Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023.
“State Parks recognizes the many sacrifices members of our nation’s military and their families have made and continue to make in the service of their country,” said California State Parks Director Armando Quintero. “It is appropriate to invite all military veterans, reservists, and active-duty personnel to visit state parks for free and connect with nature.”
Signed by Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr. in 2013, Assembly Bill 150 (Olsen), authorized California State Parks to offer veterans, active duty, and reserve military personnel from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and the National Guard of any state a reduced fee or free day use at participating state parks.
A variety of parks throughout California will offer free access, including Anderson Marsh State Historic Park in Lower Lake and Clear Lake State Park in Kelseyville.
Historic state parks include Marshall Gold Discovery, Petaluma Adobe, and El Presidio de Santa Barbara. State beaches include Torrey Pines, Pismo, and Pescadero. State vehicular recreation areas include Hollister Hills, Eastern Kern County Onyx Ranch and Prairie City, home of the Hangtown Motorcross Classic.
A full list of the participating park units can be found online.
To enter these park units for free, a valid military ID or a California driver’s license identifying the individual as a veteran must be shown to park staff.
The park units that specifically honor historic military sites or veterans that will be open for free admission on Veterans Day include Angel Island State Park, William B. Ide Adobe State Historic Park, Sutter’s Fort State Historic Park, Fort Tejon State Historic Park and Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park.
Visitors are asked to recreate responsibly, plan ahead and visit the web or social media pages of their destination to confirm hours of operation and view visitor guidelines that are in effect.
Please remember to safely share the road and be prepared for equestrians, pedestrians, joggers, wildlife, etc. on roadways.
Most people with chronic back pain naturally think their pain is caused by injuries or other problems in the body such as arthritis or bulging disks. But our research team has found that thinking about the root cause of pain as a process that’s occurring in the brain can help promote recovery. That is a key finding of a study my colleagues and I recently published in JAMA Network Open, a monthly open-access medical journal.
We have been studying a psychological treatment called pain reprocessing therapy that may help “turn off” unhelpful and unnecessary pain signals in the brain. To do this, we carried out a study in which some people were randomly chosen to receive the pain reprocessing therapy treatment, while some got a placebo injection into their backs.
We included 151 adults ages 21 to 70 years old with chronic back pain. We found that 66% of participants reported being pain-free or nearly pain-free after pain reprocessing therapy, compared with 20% of people who received a placebo.
These results were remarkable because previous trials of psychological treatments rarely led to people reporting full recoveries from chronic pain. So we needed to better understand how this treatment worked: What changed in people’s thinking that helped them recover from chronic back pain?
The most common chronic pain condition is back pain. Many patients – and doctors – are focused on identifying different back problems that they suspect may be causing the pain. So they try all sorts of treatments, often to no avail.
Pain is the brain’s alarm system, letting us know about injuries or other threats to our body. Much of the time, the system works well, accurately warning us that a part of our body is injured and needs to be protected. But when a person has been in pain for months, years or even decades, pain processing pathways are more likely to fire, and brain regions that typically are not involved in pain start to be involved. Chronic pain also leads to increased levels of activity in glial cells, which are part of the brain’s immune system. All these changes in the brain then serve to “entrench” the pain, making it persist.
People, very understandably, think that if their back hurts, there must be a problem in the back – even though we researchers know this is often not the case.
It’s critical to note that just because the signal originates in the brain, the pain is not any less real. The pain is always real, no matter what. But to treat it effectively, one needs to accurately identify the root cause.
How we do our work
In our study, we asked people to tell us in their own words what they think is the cause of their chronic back pain. It is a simple question, but few studies have asked their participants to describe the source of their pain.
Participants in our study described injuries, weak muscles, arthritis and other bodily factors as the causes of their pain. Almost no one mentioned anything about the mind or brain.
One of the main goals of pain reprocessing therapy is to help people think differently about the causes of their pain. After we treated participants with pain reprocessing therapy, about half the causes of pain that people described were related to the mind or brain. They said things like “anxiety,” “fear” or “neural pathways” were the causes of their pain.
The more that people shifted to this kind of understanding, the more their back pain went down. We think this shift in understanding reduces fear and avoidance of pain, which can tamp down pain pathways in the brain and promote healthy, pain-reducing behaviors like exercise and socializing.
Ask your health providers, or check out these online resources that can help you assess whether and when the brain is playing a role in chronic pain.
Accurately identifying the underlying causes of pain is the first step toward healing it.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Dennis Fordham. Courtesy photo. Some step children and foster children may qualify as heirs to a deceased step or foster parent’s estate and so qualify to inherit when their deceased step parent or foster parent dies without a will.
Until now, it was widely accepted that a step child or foster child could only inherit if the following two conditions were both conditions of Probate Code section 6454 are satisfied: (1) the relationship began during the step child/foster child’s minority and continued throughout their joint lifetimes; and (2) it is established by clear and convincing evidence that the step parent/foster parent would have adopted the step child/foster child but for a legal barrier.
The legal barrier requirement eliminates adult step children and foster children from qualifying under section 6454 because adult adoptions do not require any consent of the biological parent; the barrier is thus removed.
Now, however, the California Court of Appeal, Fourth Appellate District, issued its opinion in Nick Zambito v. Tracy Martino (Super Ct. No. 37-2020-000002011-PR-LA-CTL) that allows step children and foster children to qualify as an heir under section 6453.
Unlike section 6454, section 6453 is not specific to step children. Section 6453 incorporates the various ways that a parent child relationship can be established under the Uniform Parentage Act (“UPA”).
As relevant, a child does not have to be a biological child, an adopted child, or even a step child, for a parent child relationship to be established under section 6453.
Section 7661 of the Family Code, a section within the UPA, defines a “natural parent” as “a nonadoptive parent established under this part, whether biologically related to the child or not.”
In Nick Zambito v. Tracy Martino, the decedent died intestate (i.e., without a will) and the decedent’s step child initially petitioned to inherit under section 6454 the pathway specifically and uniquely provided for step children and foster children to establish inheritance rights.
However, the stepchild conceded that he did not qualify because once his biological father had died the legal barrier to adoption was removed; thus, the step child no longer qualified under section 6454.
The stepchild amended his petition to assert that his deceased step father was his “natural parent,” for inheritance purposes, under section 6453 of the Probate Code.
One way that a parent-child relationship can be established under UPA for inheritance purposes under section 6453 is if a person receives a child into his home and openly holds out the child as his natural child under section 7611(d) of the Family Code.
As the court opinion in Nick Zambito says, “… a man ‘with no biological connection to the mother, and no way to satisfy the statutory presumption of paternity may nevertheless be deemed a presume father’ under Family Code section 7611, subdivision (d), if he can prove ‘an existing familial relationship with the child,’ a bond the likes of which ‘should not lightly be dissolved’. [(citing, In re D.M. (2012) 210 Cal. App. 4th 541, 554; AG v. County of Los Angeles (2018) 28 Cal. App. 5th 373, 380.] Thus, to qualify under section 7611(d) of the Family Code, the person claiming to be a child must prove that the parent both “received the child into his or her home” and “openly held out the child as his or her natural child.”
In sum, the requirements under sections 6453 and 6454 are different and it is possible, at least in California’s Fourth Appellate District at present, for a step child to establish a parent child relationship under one section but not the other.
The appellate court harmonized section 6453 and 6453 based on each statute's own terms and the fact that section 6454 did not expressly limit a step child to establishing a parent child relationship under section 6454.
The foregoing discussion is not legal advice. Consult a qualified estate planning attorney for fact specific legal guidance.
Dennis A. Fordham, Attorney, is a State Bar-Certified Specialist in estate planning, probate and trust law. His office is at 870 S. Main St., Lakeport, Calif. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and 707-263-3235.
Lincoln Leavitt's 2022 tree with an Italian theme "That's Amore.” Photo courtesy of Hospice Services of Lake County. LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The joyous holiday season has begun with the highly anticipated fifth annual Festival of Trees Spectacular Party and Christmas tree auction, set to take place on Dec. 2 at 5 p.m.
The event will be located adjacent to Sophie's Day Spa at 3855 Main Street in Kelseyville.
It promises to be a magical evening full of cheer and festivities. Tickets for the event are on sale for $80 each until Nov. 20 and $85 after and include a no-host bar featuring Lake County wines, appetizers and a scrumptious dinner catered by Lake Event Design, all before the tree auction commences.
The Festival of Trees will showcase up to 25 brilliantly decorated Christmas trees donated by community members, organizations, and businesses.
The auction proceeds will benefit the special needs of Hospice/Palliative Care patients, as well as the Wings of Hope grief counseling program, which provides support to families with children who have lost loved ones.
Along with the tree auction, there will be a silent auction featuring beautiful holiday decor and other unique items.
For those who wish to participate, there are still a few openings available for tree donations to be included in the auction. Interested individuals are encouraged to contact Hospice Services to learn more.
In addition, community members are invited to view the spectacular trees in advance with characters from the beloved holiday classics, “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” and “Frozen,” after the Kellyville Light Parade.
The Festival of Trees has been made possible through the generous sponsorship of Platinum sponsors, including Sutter Lakeside Hospital, Lake County Tribal Health Consortium, Adventist Health Clear Lake, Kelly Butcher, Michaels Insurance, Sophie’s Day Spa, and Kelseyville Lumber.
Jamie Sells with Sophie's Day Spa is thrilled to support this inspiring event, noting, “Come to a spectacular party while supporting an amazing organization. So much talent, delectable food, and generosity for an organization that gives so much will align for an evening of celebration. It can't get better than that!”
For further event and ticket information, please call 263.6222 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., or visit the Hospice Services of Lake County website at www.lakecountyhospice.org to purchase tickets online.
Hospice Services is a nonprofit healthcare organization that has been providing compassionate comfort care for patients and families experiencing life-threatening conditions for the past 44 years.
These services are made possible through the generous support of community members and fundraising efforts.
Let us come together and spread holiday cheer for a good cause.
Janine Smith-Citron is director of development for Hospice Services of Lake County.
What's up for November? Venus and Jupiter on opposite sides of the sky, the Leonid meteors return, and the celestial "sea" surrounding Saturn.
This November, Jupiter is up in the sky all night and sets just before sunrise, while Venus rises in the early morning hours. This means you can see them on opposite sides of the sky if you happen to be up before dawn. You may recall that these two planets appeared super close together just a few months ago, back in March.
On the morning of Nov. 9, find the crescent moon hanging just beneath Venus in the early morning sky before sunrise.
Then on the 17th, look for a beautiful crescent moon sitting low in the southwest all by itself in the twilight following sunset.
Thanks to the Moon illusion, which causes the rising or setting Moon to look larger, a crescent moon low near the horizon often appears extra captivating.
Then, after sunset on Nov. 20, look toward the south to see the first quarter moon just below Ringed Planet Saturn. The pair are joined by bright stars Fomalhaut and Altair.
And then on the 24th, look for the nearly full moon close to giant Jupiter in the east after sunset. Some binoculars will be able to capture both of them in the same field of view.
Finally, in the last few days of November, you'll notice Venus is rising in the morning with a bright star very close by. That star is Spica, which is actually two massive stars that orbit around each other every four days.
The annual Leonid meteor shower returns this month. The shower peaks overnight on Nov. 17, with the most meteors visible between midnight and dawn on the 18th. The Leonid meteors are dust particles that originate from comet Tempel-Tuttle, which was discovered in 1865 and orbits the Sun every 33 years.
Leonids tend to be bright, with many producing long trains that persist for a few seconds after the initial flash of light. To view the Leonids, find a safe, dark spot away from bright lights, lie down and look straight up. The meteors can appear anywhere in the sky.
This year, the Moon is near its first quarter phase on the peak night. It sets just a couple of hours after nightfall, so it won't interfere with viewing Leonids. So bring a warm drink, bundle up, and enjoy your time searching for meteors in the November sky.
Looking toward the south a couple of hours after dark in November, you'll find the planet Saturn about halfway up the sky. This region of the sky is full of water-related constellations. For that reason, it's sometimes referred to as "the Sea" or "the Water."
Saturn currently sits within Aquarius, the water bearer, imagined as a human figure pouring water from a jug. Nearby are Pisces, the fishes, and Capricornus, the strange, mythical sea goat. Just beneath Aquarius is the Southern Fish, and just above him is the Dolphin.
To the east of Aquarius you'll find the constellation Cetus, a sea monster or whale. And next to Cetus is the constellation Eridanus, which represents a long, winding cosmic river.
Now, these star patterns are not particularly bright or easy to pick out. But it is interesting to note that this whole area of the night sky is populated by mythical figures related to water.
And speaking of connections between water and wonder, NASA plans to launch its Europa Clipper spacecraft next fall to study Jupiter's icy moon Europa — which is thought to contain an ocean that might support life.
And you can send your name to Europa, etched on the spacecraft. Visit this link to sign the "message in a bottle" that will be sent across the cosmic sea from Earth to Europa — from one ocean world to another.
Stay up to date on NASA's missions exploring the solar system and beyond at http://science.nasa.gov.
"What's Up" is NASA's longest running web video series. It had its first episode in April 2007 with original host Jane Houston Jones. Today, Preston Dyches, Christopher Harris and Lisa Poje are the science communicators and space enthusiasts who produce this monthly video series at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Additional astronomy subject matter guidance is provided by JPL's Bill Dunford, Gary Spiers, Lyle Tavernier and GSFC's Molly Wasser.
“Skittles.” Photo courtesy of Clearlake Animal Control. CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control’s kennels are filled with dogs deserving a chance at new homes.
The Clearlake Animal Control website lists 48 adoptable dogs.
This week’s dogs include “Skittles,” a one and a half year old female pit bull terrier mix with a black and white coat.
“Dumbo.” Photo courtesy of Clearlake Animal Control. There also is “Dumbo,” a year-old male pit bull terrier with a black and white coat.
The shelter is located at 6820 Old Highway 53. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
For more information, call the shelter at 707-762-6227, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.
This week’s adoptable dogs are featured below.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
An elk crosses a roadway. Photo courtesy of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — It’s that time of year when the California Department of Fish and Wildlife reminds drivers to be aware of wildlife on state roads and highways.
Every autumn, as Daylight Saving Time concludes, the number of vehicle-wildlife collisions on California roadways increases.
As drivers adjust to less daylight during the evening commute during the first week of November, it’s also important to understand this is also the time of year that deer, elk, bears and other animals are typically on the move for migration, mating or foraging.
Over the past month, numerous dead deer have appeared along Lake County’s highways and roadways after they were struck by vehicles.
Collisions with wildlife can be dangerous and costly for drivers. Nearly 400 people were injured in more than two thousand collisions in 2019 involving wildlife, according to the California Highway Patrol.
Also, the UC Davis Road Ecology Center estimates the total annual cost of animal-vehicle conflicts in California to be about $250 million.
“Wildlife-vehicle collisions pose an increasingly significant threat to both people and wildlife and can result in serious injury or death. This time of year, large native species such as deer and elk are more likely to cross highways or roads during their mating season (rut), and black bears are on the search for food,” said Human-Wildlife Conflict Program Coordinator Vicky Monroe. “We ask drivers to remain cautious, vigilant, and aware of their surroundings while driving to help reduce this conflict."
Standard driving safety tips that also benefit wildlife include:
• Be extra alert when driving near areas wildlife frequent, such as streams and rivers, and reduce your speed especially around curves. • Don't text and drive! Leave your phone alone; it can wait. • Pay extra attention driving during the morning and evening hours when wildlife are often most active. • If you see an animal on or near the road, know that others may be following. • Don't litter. Trash and food odors can attract animals to roadways. • Pay attention to road shoulders. Look for movement or reflecting eyes. Slow down and honk your horn if you see an animal on or near the road. • Respect wildlife. California is their home too.
CDFW thanks drivers for recognizing the importance of safe driving as daylight hours are reduced.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Lake County Registrar of Voters Office has reported on the candidate filings to date for the March presidential primary election.
Several county, state and federal offices will be on the ballot for the primary, which takes place on March 5, 2024.
The partisan offices on the ballot include United States president, county central committees and councils, United States Senator (full term), United States Senator (partial/unexpired term), United States Representative in Congress for District 4, State Assembly Member for District 4.
Nonpartisan offices up for election include Superior Court judges for departments 1, 3 and 4; county supervisors for districts 1, 4 and 5; and sheriff-coroner.
The Registrar’s Office said the timeframe for submitting in lieu of petitions — which reduce the cost for filings — ends at 5 p.m. Nov. 8.
All candidates for elective office must file nomination documents — which include nomination papers and declaration of candidacy — as well as pay a nonrefundable filing fee. That’s except for judicial candidates, who pay when filing the declaration of intention to have their name printed on the ballot.
The nomination filing period begins Nov. 13 and ends at 5 p.m. Dec. 8.
If an incumbent fails to file during this period, candidate filing will extend for any candidate except the incumbent until Dec. 13 by 5 p.m.
Registered voters interested in filing for county central committees and county council must file nomination papers and a declaration of candidacy between Sept. 29 and Dec. 8.
Filings to date
The Registrar of Voters Office said the following candidates have been issued in-lieu petitions so far.
• Judge of the Superior Court, Department 1: Michael S. Lunas. • Judge of the Superior Court, Department 3: Andrew S. Blum. • Judge of the Superior Court, Department 4: Shanda M. Harry, Anna Gregorian and William Conwell. • County Supervisor, District 1: Bryan Pritchard, Bren Boyd, Sean Millerick and John H. Hess. • County Supervisor, District 4: Brad Rasmussen, Laura McAndrews Sammel, Scott Jason Barnett and Chris Read. • County Supervisor, District 5: Jessica Pyska, Dennis Holzinger and Daniel “Boone” Bridges.
Candidates for judicial offices are required to file a declaration of intention and pay a nonrefundable filing fee before filing for office. Judicial candidates may file a declaration of intention between Oct. 30 and Nov. 8 at 5 p.m.
The elections office said Lunas, Blum, Harry and Gregorian have filed their declarations of intention.
Voters desiring information regarding any of the offices listed below may contact the Registrar of Voters office in person at 325 N Forbes St., Lakeport, by phone at 707-263-2372 or toll free at 888-235-6730.
The Registrar of Voters office is open Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., excluding county holidays, to assist both candidates and voters. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. For additional information, visit the registrar’s website or email the department at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
The blue areas on this map of Mars are regions where NASA missions have detected subsurface water ice (from the equator to 60 degrees north latitude). Scientists can use the map – part of the Subsurface Water Ice Mapping project – to decide where the first astronauts to set foot on the Red Planet should land. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Planetary Science Institute. The map could help the agency decide where the first astronauts to the Red Planet should land. The more available water, the less missions will need to bring.
Buried ice will be a vital resource for the first people to set foot on Mars, serving as drinking water and a key ingredient for rocket fuel.
But it would also be a major scientific target: Astronauts or robots could one day drill ice cores much as scientists do on Earth, uncovering the climate history of Mars and exploring potential habitats (past or present) for microbial life.
The need to look for subsurface ice arises because liquid water isn’t stable on the Martian surface: The atmosphere is so thin that water immediately vaporizes.
There’s plenty of ice at the Martian poles – mostly made of water, although carbon dioxide, or dry ice, can be found as well – but those regions are too cold for astronauts (or robots) to survive for long.
That’s where the NASA-funded Subsurface Water Ice Mapping project comes in. SWIM, as it’s known, recently released its fourth set of maps – the most detailed since the project began in 2017.
Led by the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, SWIM pulls together data from several NASA missions, including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, 2001 Mars Odyssey, and the now-inactive Mars Global Surveyor. Using a mix of data sets, scientists have identified the likeliest places to find Martian ice that could be accessed from the surface by future missions.
Instruments on these spacecraft have detected what look like masses of subsurface frozen water along Mars’ mid-latitudes.
The northern mid-latitudes are especially attractive because they have a thicker atmosphere than most other regions on the planet, making it easier to slow a descending spacecraft.
The ideal astronaut landing sites would be a sweet spot at the southernmost edge of this region — far enough north for ice to be present but close enough to the equator to ensure the warmest possible temperatures for astronauts in an icy region.
“If you send humans to Mars, you want to get them as close to the equator as you can,” said Sydney Do, JPL’s SWIM project manager. “The less energy you have to expend on keeping astronauts and their supporting equipment warm, the more you have for other things they’ll need.”
The ice-exposing impact crater at the center of this image is an example of what scientists look for when mapping places where future astronauts should land on Mars. It’s one of several such impacts incorporated into the latest version of a series of NASA-funded maps of subsurface water ice on the Red Planet. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona. Building a better map
Previous iterations of the map relied on lower-resolution imagers, radar, thermal mappers, and spectrometers, all of which can hint at buried ice but can’t outright confirm its presence or quantity.
For this latest SWIM map, scientists relied on two higher-resolution cameras aboard MRO. Context Camera data was used to further refine the northern hemisphere maps and, for the first time, HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) data was incorporated to provide the most detailed perspective of the ice’s boundary line as close to the equator as possible.
Scientists routinely use HiRISE to study fresh impact craters caused by meteoroids that may have excavated chunks of ice. Most of these craters are no more than 33 feet (10 meters) in diameter, although in 2022 HiRISE captured a 492-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) impact crater that revealed a motherlode of ice that had been hiding beneath the surface.
“These ice-revealing impacts provide a valuable form of ground truth in that they show us locations where the presence of ground ice is unequivocal,” said Gareth Morgan, SWIM’s co-lead at the Planetary Science Institute. “We can then use these locations to test that our mapping methods are sound.”
In addition to ice-exposing impacts, the new map includes sightings by HiRISE of so-called “polygon terrain,” where the seasonal expansion and contraction of subsurface ice causes the ground to form polygonal cracks. Seeing these polygons extending around fresh, ice-filled impact craters is yet another indication that there’s more ice hidden beneath the surface at these locations.
There are other mysteries that scientists can use the map to study, as well.
“The amount of water ice found in locations across the Martian mid-latitudes isn’t uniform; some regions seem to have more than others, and no one really knows why,” said Nathaniel Putzig, SWIM’s other co-lead at the Planetary Science Institute. “The newest SWIM map could lead to new hypotheses for why these variations happen.” He added that it could also help scientists tweak models of how the ancient Martian climate evolved over time, leaving larger amounts of ice deposited in some regions and lesser amounts in others.
SWIM’s scientists hope the project will serve as a foundation for a proposed Mars Ice Mapper mission — an orbiter that would be equipped with a powerful radar custom-designed to search for near-surface ice beyond where HiRISE has confirmed its presence.
These Mars global maps show the likely distribution of water ice buried within the upper 3 feet (1 meter) of the planet’s surface and represent the latest data from the SWIM project. Buried ice will be a vital resource for astronauts on Mars, serving as drinking water and a key ingredient for rocket fuel. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/PSI.
How to resolve AdBlock issue? 
