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It’s starting to look like Christmas—on Mars. The surface of the planet is mostly red, but the latest pictures show a winter landscape that has turned the southern part of the Red Planet white.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter captured a stunning winter scene on Mars, but it doesn’t always snow. In fact, the South pole of Mars has layers of carbon dioxide ice and dust, according to ESAmaking a spectacular appearance in the southern region of the Australe Scopuli.
In winter on Mars the temperature drops to -190 degrees Celsius (-123 degrees Celsius). Although it is very cold, Mars does not have any snow. Unlike snow on Earth, Martian snow comes in two forms: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. On the one hand, the ice turns to gas before it hits the surface, due to the very thin atmosphere of the earth; ice water, on the other hand, it reaches the top.
Although it looks like a strange place in winter, the pictures were taken in June, when it was summer in the south of Mars. According to ESA to releasethe heat of the Sun causes the ice of its season to begin to retreat, which can be seen on the left side of the image where the black dots enter.
When sunlight shines on the surface of the dry ice, the ice underneath evaporates from the solid surface—and creates pockets of trapped air. The pressure builds until the ice on the surface begins to crack, sending jets of air through the surface, carrying black dust from below. After drilling, the dust falls back onto the top of the wind-driven image.
In this high-resolution view of the Australe Scopuli’s ice caps, ice and dust intersect in a dreamscape on the Martian surface. This image was captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express, allowing the landscape to be reproduced from a digital version of the terrain. This image gives a clear picture of the fan shape created by the dust explosion, creating a boundary between layered deposits.
ESA’s Mars Express was launched in 2003, and has been providing stunning images of the surface of Mars for more than 20 years. The spacecraft made a complete map of the atmosphere of Mars, observed the planet’s moons Phobos and Deimos in detail, and explored the history of water across Mars. according to the ESA. The mission also carried another person called Beagle 2, but that was it lost on arrival and has never done any scientific work on the Red (or, apparently, the white) Planet.
