Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas—on Mars. The otherworldly landscape is, for the most part, a distinct red hue, but recent images reveal unusual frozen features that have turned the red planet’s south pole white.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter has captured stunning views of the winter wonderland on Mars, but it’s not your regular snowfall. Instead, Mars’ south pole is covered in a layer of carbon dioxide ice and dust. ESAThe southern austral scopuli of the planet make for mesmerizing views
Temperatures can drop to -190 degrees Fahrenheit (-123 degrees Celsius) during winter on Mars. As cold as it is, Mars never gets more than a few feet of ice. Unlike snow on Earth, Martian snow comes in two flavors: water ice and carbon dioxide or dry ice. On the one hand, the planet’s thin atmosphere causes water ice to turn to gas before it hits the surface; Dry ice, on the other hand, reaches the surface.
Although it looks like a winter wonderland, the pictures were taken in June, when it was almost summer at the south pole of Mars. Pursuant to an ESA releaseThe sun’s warming rays cause the seasonal ice sheets to begin their retreat, evident in the dark patches on the left side of the image.
As sunlight shines through the transparent upper layer of dry ice, the underlying ice is desorbed – turning from a solid state directly into vapor – and creates pockets of trapped gas. Pressure builds until the upper ice layers begin to crack, sending jets of gas bursting through the surface, carrying dark dust from below. After being blown through, the dust returns to the surface in a fan-shaped pattern driven by the wind.
In the above view of Austral Scopuli’s seasonal ice caps, layers of ice and dust overlap in a swirling dream across the Martian surface. The image was captured by the high resolution stereo camera on Mars Express, which allowed the topography of the landscape to be derived from the digital terrain model. The image offers a closer look at the fan-shaped pattern created by the dust explosion, creating boundaries between layered deposits.
ESA’s Mars Express launched in 2003, and has provided breathtaking images of the Martian landscape for more than 20 years. The spacecraft compiled the most complete map of the chemical composition of the Martian atmosphere, observed the planet’s moons Phobos and Deimos in detail, and traced the history of water across Mars. According to ESA. The mission also carried a lander called Beagle 2, but that was it Lost on arrival And did not conduct scientific operations on the red (or, apparently, white) planet.
