Take a winter tour of Mars with NASA in this holiday video
NASA is advocating a ‘winter wonderland’ on Mars.
“Dreaming of a White Christmas” may never bring to mind the alien landscapes that appear in the cold corners of the red planet. But the space agency is excited about it all. Its many missions over the past few decades reveal icy oddities Marchas well as how Mars sometimes resembles Earth.
Because NASA is now mission deep in its own right Artemis program, learning how humans can thrive off our planet is crucial. Water ice is a valuable discovery for this. And the new video (opens in a new tab) from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, a major hub for NASA’s robotic explorers in space, reveals what snow, frost and ice look like on Mars.
Related: Mars is a ‘winter wonderland’ in this icy (and stunning) image.
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“If you go to the right places, you’ll find water ice, just like what we have on Earth,” JPL Mars scientist Sylvain Piquex says in the Dec. 21 video, which NASA released. posted on YouTube (opens in a new tab). When NASA Phoenix Mars Landing scraped the Arctic Martian soil in 2008he saw water ice just below the surface.
“This is the kind of water ice that astronauts could use in the future when we go there,” adds Piquex.
Mars also has dry ice, a solid form of carbon dioxide (CO2). Instead of melting, as water ice does, CO2 ice sublimates. And as this material transitions from solid to gas, it creates alien landscapes.
“For example, we see spider-shaped features, fans, geysers, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, all kinds of unique objects that are really hard to understand, but are beautiful and unique to Mars,” says Piquex.
Ice crystals also fall on Mars, like snow on Earth. When Phoenix used its Canadian-built LIDAR (or light detection and ranging) to fire a laser into the planet’s sky, it detected water ice crystals falling from a cloud.
Frost also covers some places on Mars. NASA’s Viking Landers captured images of freezing water in the 1970s, and more recently their Spaceship Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have observed their CO2 freeze.
“CO2 frosts [is] something we don’t have on Earth. It’s very cold where you’ll find CO2 ice, something like -190 degrees Fahrenheit,” says Piquex.
That’s a lot colder than a December”bomb cyclone“that the US is preparing to face this weekend.
But NASA put the winters of these two planets into perspective attached statement (opens in a new tab).
“No region on Mars receives more than a few feet of snow, most of which falls on extremely flat areas,” the statement said. “As cold as it is, don’t expect Rocky Mountain snowfall.”
Follow Doris Elin Urrutia on Twitter @salazar_elin. follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.
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