NASA makes the case for a “wonderful winter” on Mars.
“Dreaming of a white Christmas” might never bring to mind the alien landscapes that appear at the frigid corner of the Red Planet. But throughout the entire space of the agent. Its many missions over the past several decades show the icy regions on Mars, as well as how much Mars sometimes resembles Earth.
As NASA is now one mission deep in its Artemis program, learning how our planet’s humans can survive is crucial. The invention of ice water is useful for that purpose. And a 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 — shows what snow, ice and ice are like on Mars.
Related: Mars’ “winter wonderland” is frozen (and stunning) in this image
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“If you go to the right places, you will find water ice like the one we have on Earth.” (Opens in a new tab). When NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander touched down on the Martian arctic in 2008, it soon saw water ice beneath the surface.
“This is a type of water ice that astronauts could potentially use in the future when they go there,” Piquex adds.
Mars also has dry ice, a solid form of carbon dioxide (CO2). Rather than melting, as water does with ice, the ice is sublimated by CO2. And because this matter is turned from a solid into a gas, it creates foreign lands.
“For example, we see spider shapes, fans, geysers, dalmatic spots, fried eggs, all kinds of unique objects that are really challenging to understand, but beautiful and unique on Mars,” says Piquex.
Ice crystals also fall on Mars, like snow on Earth. When the Canadian-built Phoenix LIDAR (or, light detection and ranging) was used to shoot a laser into the planet’s sky, it detected water ice crystals falling from the cloud.
Frontinus also places some lorics on Mars. NASA’s Viking landers took pictures of frozen water in the 1970s, and more recently, its Odyssey spacecraft and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter observed its CO2 ice.
“CO2 frost [is] something we don’t have on Earth. It’s very cold where you want to find CO2 ice, something like -190 degrees Fahrenheit,” says Piquex.
That’s much colder than the December “bomb cyclone” that the US is planning for this weekend.
But NASA put these two planets in perspective in a statement accompanying the winter (Opens in a new tab).
“No area will receive more than a few feet of snow on Tuesday, most of which will fall in the flat areas,” the statement read. “Cold as it is, do not expect the snows to be brought worthy of the rocky mountains.”
Follow Doris Elin Urrutia on Twitter @salazar_elin. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or * Facebook.
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