NASA’s Office of Space Science has selected a group of University of Colorado at Boulder researchers to spend three years mapping the polar ice on Mars using satellite data. The research team from the National Snow and Ice Data Center will create a “virtual sensor” by combining data from two instruments currently orbiting the Red Planet on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor satellite, said principal investigator and glaciologist Anne Nolin. The scientists will apply remote-sensing techniques to study the Mars data and help them to both identify the surface composition of Mars’ polar ice and plot its perimeters.