Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – In winter, the surface of the planet Mars is filled with cubic snow, ice and frost. Its shape is not like the snow that exists on Earth, where there is no actual snowdrift in the Rocky Mountains.
Other than that, most of it falls on very flat areas. Looking at the orbit of Mars, it takes much longer to reach winter during a Martian year, or the equivalent of two Earth years.
This winter peaks at the poles of Mars, where temperatures reach minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 123 degrees Celsius).
According to NASA scientists, snow on Mars is of two types: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Because the Martian air is so thin and the temperature is so cold, the water ice in the snow sublimates or becomes a gas before it even hits the ground.
“It’s falling enough that we can snowboard on it,” said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research covers a wide range of winter phenomena.
“However, if you want to ski, you have to go into craters or cliffs, where snow can accumulate on the sloping surface.” he added, quoted by the official NASA website, on Monday (2/1/2023).
Snow only occurs in the coldest parts of Mars at the poles, under clouds and at night. Cameras on orbiting spacecraft can’t see through those clouds, and space missions can’t survive the freezing cold. As a result, no images of snowfall have ever been recorded. But scientists know it’s happening, thanks to some special scientific instruments.
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Photo: NASA
Winter sightings on Mars |
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was able to peer through cloud cover using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which detects light in wavelengths invisible to the human eye.
This capability allows scientists to detect carbon dioxide snow falling to the ground. In 2008, NASA sent the Phoenix lander within 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers) of the Martian north pole, where it used its laser instruments to detect falling snow ice on the surface.
Because water molecules hold together when frozen, snowflakes on Earth have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: the way the atoms arrange themselves determines the shape of the crystal. In the case of carbon dioxide, the molecules in dry ice always fit together in a rectangular shape when frozen.
“Because carbon dioxide ice is rectangular, we knew dry ice snowflakes would be cubes,” Piqueux said. “Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we were able to determine that these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.”
Water and carbon dioxide can form frost on Mars, and both types of frost occur much more widely on the planet than snow.
(tib)
