Numerous NASA missions over the past few decades are revealing ice anomalies on Mars, as well as how similar Mars is to Earth in some ways.
A new video from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, a home hub for NASA explorers, reveals what snow, sleet and ice look like on Mars.
The video shows the snowy landscape on the surface of the Red Planet as if it were a “winter wonderland”.
“If you go to specific places, you’ll find water ice, just like that on Earth,” says Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars scientist Sylvain Pecques in a Dec. 21 video that NASA posted on its YouTube site.
When NASA’s Phoenix Mars probe scraped the Martian land at the north pole in 2008, it saw water ice just below the surface.
“This is the kind of water ice astronauts in the future might use when we go out there,” Pickix adds.
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Incredible footage of a “winter wonderland” on Mars
Mars also contains dry ice, which is a solid form of carbon dioxide (CO2). Instead of melting, as water ice does, carbon dioxide ice sublimes. When this substance transforms from a solid into a gaseous substance, it creates strange landscapes.
“For example, we see spider-like features and fans and fried eggs…and all sorts of unique things that are really hard to figure out, but are beautiful and unique on Mars,” Bikix explains.
Ice crystals also fall on Mars, like snow falls on Earth. And when the Phoenix spacecraft used Light Detection and Ranging Instrument (LIDAR) technology to fire lasers into the planet’s sky, it detected water ice crystals falling from a cloud.
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Incredible footage of a “winter wonderland” on Mars
Frost also covers some places on Mars: NASA’s Viking lander took pictures of freezing water in the 1970s, and more recently, the Odyssey space probe and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter detected carbon dioxide freezing.
“Carbon dioxide ice is something we don’t find on Earth. It’s so cold you’ll find carbon dioxide ice at -190 degrees Fahrenheit (-123 degrees Celsius), and it’s much colder than the ‘hurricane bomb’ humans are experiencing. United is preparing for, says Becks, United to face him this weekend.
Interestingly, on December 26, the red planet begins its new year, which will last 687 Earth days. The planet has four seasons, winter, spring, summer and autumn, just like on Earth. Winters on the Red Planet are much colder than on Earth, with temperatures on Mars dropping to minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit (-60 degrees Celsius).
