Ilham Abdulaziz:
Posted on: Saturday, December 31, 2022 – 10:34 PM | Last update: Saturday, December 31, 2022 – 10:34 PM
NASA’s “Perseverance” and “Ingenuity” helicopter were able to monitor images of an ancient river delta on Mars, which fed the Jezero crater billions of years ago.
And NASA published a video clip showing a side of the winter season on the Red Planet, where the flats are transformed as a wonderland, according to a report published by the American network CNN.
As the main feature of the planet, dust also drives the Martian weather. Dust usually heralds the advent of winter, but the planet is no stranger to snow, ice and frost. At the poles of Mars, the temperature can drop to minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit.
There are two types of ice on Mars, one of which is the kind we live on Earth, made of frozen water, thin Martian air and subzero temperatures that conventional snow sublimates, or goes from a solid directly into a gas, before it touches the ground on Mars.
The other type of Martian snow is carbon dioxide-based, or dry ice, and can land on the surface. A few feet of snow tend to fall on Mars in the flat areas near the poles.
“Until now, no orbiters or rovers have been able to see snowfall on the Red Planet because the weather phenomenon only occurs at the poles,” Sylvain Piccio, a Mars scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told the paper in a statement. Under cloud cover at night, cameras in orbiters can’t peer through clouds, and robotic explorers haven’t been developed that can withstand the freezing temperatures at the poles.
However, the Mars Climate Sounder on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can detect light that is not visible to the human eye, and it has detected carbon dioxide snowfall on the poles of Mars, and the Phoenix probe, which arrived at Mars in 2008, used one of its laser tools. to detect glacial water ice from its location about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) from the Martian north pole.
“Because CO2 ice has a symmetry of four, we know that the dry snowflakes will be cube-shaped, and thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can say that these snowflakes will be smaller than the width of a human hair,” Becchio added.
According to the newspaper, NASA scientists celebrated the Martian New Year on December 26, which coincided with the arrival of the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere.
Scientists calculate the years of Mars starting from the planet’s northern vernal equinox that occurred in 1955, which is an arbitrary starting point, but it helps to have order, according to a post on the NASA Mars page on the social networking site Facebook, which states that Numbering the Martian years helps scientists keep track of long-term observations, such as weather data collected by NASA’s spacecraft over decades.
And the newspaper continued that ice and carbon dioxide are formed on the surface of Mars, and it can occur far from the poles, and the Odyssey orbital vehicle (which entered the orbit of Mars in 2001) saw frost forming and turning into gas in sunlight, while the Viking lander spotted ice frost on the surface of Mars. Mars upon her arrival in the 70’s.
And at the end of winter, the season’s accumulated ice can melt and turn into gas, creating unique shapes that remind NASA scientists of Swiss cheese, diamond spots, fried eggs, spiders, and other unusual formations.
During the winter at Jezero Crater, the recent high temperatures were around 8 F (minus 13 C), while the lows were around 120 F (minus 84 C).
Meanwhile, at Gale Crater in the southern hemisphere near the Martian equator, the Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012, saw highs of 5 F (minus 15 C) and lows of 105 F (minus 76 C). percentage).
Seasons on Mars tend to last longer; Because the planet’s elliptical orbit around the sun means that one Martian year is 687 days, or roughly two Earth years.