Numerous NASA missions over the past several decades have revealed ice anomalies on Mars, as well as how similar Mars is to Earth in some ways.
New video from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, a home hub for NASA explorers, reveals what snow, sleet and ice look like on Mars.
The video shows the snowy landscape on the surface of the Red Planet, as if it were a “winter wonderland.”
“If you go to specific locations, you will find water ice, just like the one on Earth,” said Mars scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Sylvain Pecques in a video on December 21, which NASA released on its YouTube site.
When NASA’s Phoenix Mars probe scraped the Martian land at the north pole in 2008, it saw water ice just below the surface.
“This is the kind of water ice that astronauts in the future could use when we go out there,” Beckix added.
Mars also contains dry ice, which is a solid form of carbon dioxide (CO2). Instead of melting, as water ice does, carbon dioxide ice sublimates. As this substance transforms from a solid to a gaseous substance, it creates strange landscapes.
“For example, we see features in the form of spiders, fans and fried eggs. And all kinds of unique things that are really hard to understand, but are beautiful and unique to Mars.”
Ice crystals also fall on Mars, like snow on Earth. And when the Phoenix probe used LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging Device) technology 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 lander took pictures of water frost in the 1970s, and finally the Odyssey spacecraft and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter detected carbon dioxide frost.
“The CO2 frost is something we don’t find on Earth,” Beckix said. It’s so cold you’ll find carbon dioxide ice at -190 degrees Fahrenheit (-123 degrees Celsius).” That’s much colder than the “bomb hurricane” that hit the United States.
It is noteworthy that on December 26, the red planet begins its new year, which will last 687 Earth days. The planet has four seasons, winter, spring, summer and autumn, just like on Earth. Winters on the Red Planet are much colder than on Earth, with temperatures on Mars dropping to minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit (-60 degrees Celsius).