Take a winter tour on Mars with NASA in this vacation video
NASA is calling for a “winter wonderland” on Mars.
“Dreaming a White Christmas” may never bring to mind the otherworldly landscapes that appear in the frigid corners of the Red Planet. But the space agency is all excited about it. The many missions of the past decades reveal icy oddities Marsas well as how much Mars sometimes resembles Earth.
Since NASA is now a mission deep into its Artemis program, it is crucial to learn how humans can thrive beyond our planet. Water ice is a valuable discovery for this. And the new video (opens in new tab) from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California – a major hub for NASA’s robotic space exploration – 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 locations, you’re going to find water ice, just like we have on Earth,” says JPL Mars scientist Sylvain Piquex in the Dec. 21 video, which NASA released on YouTube (opens in new tab). When NASAs Phoenix Mars lander scraped the arctic Martian soil in 2008saw the water ice just below the surface.
“This is the kind of water ice that astronauts could use in the future if we go there,” Piquex added.
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 changes from solid to gas, it creates otherworldly landscapes.
“For example, we see spider-like features, fans, geysers, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, all sorts of unique objects that are really hard to understand, but that are beautiful and unique to Mars,” Piquex says.
Ice crystals also fall on Mars, like snow on Earth. When Phoenix used its Canadian-built LIDAR (or Light Detection and Range) 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 water frost in the 1970s, and more recently Odyssey spacecraft and the Mars Exploration Orbiter have observed the CO2 frost.
“CO2 frost [is] something we don’t have on Earth. It’s extremely cold where you would find CO2 ice, something like -190 degrees Fahrenheit,” says Piquex.
That’s much colder than a December”bomb cyclonewhat the US is preparing for this weekend.
But NASA compared the winters on these two planets into one accompanying statement (opens in new tab).
“No region of Mars gets more than a few feet of snow, most of which falls over extremely flat areas,” the statement reads. “No matter how cold it is, don’t expect blizzards worthy of the Rocky Mountains.”
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