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 on Mars, as well as how Mars sometimes resembles Earth.
As NASA is now deep into its Artemis program, it is crucial to learn how humans can thrive outside of our planet. Water ice is a valuable discovery for this purpose. And new video (opens in a new tab) from California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a major hub for NASA’s robotic explorers in space, reveals what snow, frost and ice look like in March
Related: Mars is a ‘winter wonderland’ in this icy (and stunning) image.
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Frost covers these sand dunes on Mars just after the winter solstice in this image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona) Carbon dioxide frost covers these megadunes on Mars as seen by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)
“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 posted on YouTube (opens in a new tab). When NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander scraped the arctic Martian soil in 2008, it 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.
Strange “fried egg features” on Mars stand out as impressive winter features on the Red Planet. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)
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 water freeze in the 1970s, and more recently its Odyssey spacecraft and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have observed its CO2 freeze.
“CO2 frosts [is] something we don’t have on Earth. It’s extremely cold where you’ll find CO2 ice, something like -190 degrees Fahrenheit,” says Piquex.
That’s much colder than a December “bomb cyclone” that the U.S. is preparing to face this weekend.
But NASA put the winters of these two planets into perspective in an 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.”
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