A newly released image of Mars shows an icy scene, with red and white ribbons dancing across the frigid landscape near the planet’s south pole, according to a report from Spaces.
While the snowy scene may evoke the feeling of a “winter wonderland” on the Red Planet, it was actually captured by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft. This means that the frozen image actually represents spring in the southern hemisphere of Mars, and the Mars ice glaze is waning.
And just six days before much of Earth celebrates the New Year on December 26, the Red Planet will begin its new year, which will last 687 Earth days.
And the planet has four seasons, winter, spring, summer, and fall, and just like on Earth, the Red Planet’s winter is cold and summer is hot, although winter is colder than our season, as temperatures on Mars they drop to minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit. (minus 60 degrees Celsius).
The Christmas season is also special for Mars Express, and Christmas Day 2022 marks the 19th anniversary of the spacecraft’s arrival on Mars.
Probably the most striking features in the newly released image are two massive impact craters, associated with alternating layers of water ice and sediment called “polar stratified sediments”.
As the ice dries, areas of higher elevation appear frost-free, and throughout the image, dark sand dunes flow through surface frost in other areas.
Dune fields also appear as sharp ridges running parallel to the direction of the prevailing winds and in keeping with the shape of the main features.
Scientists believe the dust filling these dunes is dark because it comes from buried material from volcanoes that erupted in Mars’ ancient history and were eventually exposed to strong Martian winds that carried them easily across the Red Planet’s surface.
Other dark spots in the image represent this dust and the work of jets that erupt on the ice surface as the underlying carbon dioxide ice turns directly into a gas, a process called sublimation. These jets shoot fountains of dust into the Martian atmosphere, then settle in dark patches on the planet’s surface.
However, these are not the only elements of the image resulting from the sublimation: the polar region is dotted with a series of large irregular structures produced by the sublimation ice, which look like empty lakes carved into the surface of Mars, with a clear example of this visible in the upper left corner of the image.
Observing these features from orbit means scientists can observe the processes that are shaping the Martian surface and changing the appearance of the polar regions.
