Winter lights up Mars the red planet To new and different looks as temperatures drop at the planet’s poles to the lowest levels of minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit, NASA robotic vehicles revealed on the planet’s coldest season, which includes snowflakes and huge dunes.
According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, it was Mars exploration vehicle It has been in orbit for more than 16 years and has returned more than 436 terabytes of data to NASA, as its mission is to look for evidence that water once flowed on the surface of Mars.
Martian snow comes in two forms: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. The former usually dissolves before hitting the ground while the latter reaches the surface. Snow occurs in the coldest parts of the planet where surface missions can’t survive, so we don’t have photos of snow falling on Mars.
But the matter is however different on Mars regarding the ice, which consists of carbon dioxide, where the particles in the dry ice are bound together in four shapes when frozen, not in 6 flaps as on Earth.
“Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know that dry snowflakes will be cube-shaped,” said Sylvain Beccio, a Martian scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena.
The accumulated ice begins to melt, taking on unique shapes. The clear ice allows sunlight to heat the underlying gas. This gas eventually explodes, sending dust fans to the surface. Scientists have already begun studying the type of dune that forms as a result of this process.
