Winter fairy tale on Mars
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Winter’s Tale on MarsWinter on Mars has turned the Red Planet into something spectacular, but it doesn’t quite look like a holiday greeting card.
Temperatures at the planet’s poles plummet to chilling lows of minus 87 degrees Celsius. Although Mars is not colonized by humans, robotic rovers on the planet have made several discoveries about the cold season. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been in orbit for over 16 years and has delivered more than 436 terabits of data to Earth.
His mission is to find evidence that water once flowed on the surface of Mars.
There are two types of Martian snow: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. The former usually dissipates before it touches the surface, while the latter reaches it. Snow falls in the coldest parts of the planet where ground missions would not be able to survive, which is why humanity still has no photographs of snow falling on Mars. Snowflakes on Earth have six sides due to the way water molecules connect. But on Mars, things are different.
According to NASA, dry ice molecules combine with carbon dioxide to form four molecules when frozen.
“Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know that dry ice snowflakes will be cube-shaped,” Sylvain Piqué, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research includes various winter phenomena, said in a statement.
“Thanks to the Mars climate sensor, we can tell that these snowflakes will be smaller than the width of a human hair.
There is enough snow for you to ski over,” Piqué added.
At the end of winter, the accumulated ice begins to melt, taking on unique shapes that scientists say resemble everything from fried eggs to Swiss cheese. The melting is also causing geysers to erupt, according to the space agency. The translucent ice allows sunlight to heat the gas underneath, and that gas eventually blasts outward, kicking up dust fans to the surface.
Christina DENISYUK.
Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona
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