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It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas on Mars. The otherworldly landscape is, for the most part, a distinctly red hue, but recent images reveal unusual frosty features that turn the Red Planet’s south pole white.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter has captured stunning views of a winter wonderland on Mars, but it’s not your regular snowfall. Instead, the south pole of Mars is covered in layers of carbon dioxide ice and dust. ESAalong the Australe Scopuli, the southern region of the planet, creates a fascinating landscape.
Winter on Mars sees temperatures drop as low as -190 degrees Fahrenheit (-123 degrees Celsius). As cold as it is, Mars doesn’t get more than a few feet of snow. Unlike snow on Earth, Martian snow has two flavors: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. On the one hand, water ice turns into gas without touching the surface due to the thinness of the planet’s atmosphere; dry ice, on the other hand, reaches the surface.
Although it looks like a winter wonderland, the pictures were taken in June, which is almost summer at the south pole of Mars. According to the ESA releaseThe sun’s warming rays are causing the seasonal ice sheets to begin retreating, which can be seen on the left side of the image where dark spots filter through.
As sunlight passes through the transparent upper layers of dry ice, the ice underneath sublimates — turning directly from a solid state to vapor — and creates pockets of trapped gas. The pressure builds until the ice sheets above begin to crack, exploding from the surface and sending jets of gas carrying dark dust from below. After blasting its way, the dust falls back to the surface in a wind-driven fan.
In an overhead view of Australe Scopuli’s seasonal ice caps, layers of ice and dust overlap in a swirling nap on the Martian surface. The image was captured by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express and allowed the topography of the landscape to be derived from a digital terrain model. The image offers a closer look at the fan-shaped pattern created by dust explosions, creating boundaries between layered sediments.
ESA’s Mars Express was launched in 2003 and has been providing 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, made detailed observations of the planet’s moons Phobos and Deimos, and traced the history of water on Mars. According to the ESA. The mission also carried a lander called Beagle 2, but that was it lost when he arrived and has never conducted scientific operations on the Red (or, apparently, the White) Planet.
