It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas…on Mars. The otherworldly landscape is, for the most part, a distinctive shade of red, but recent images reveal unusual icy features that have turned the Red Planet’s south pole white.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter captured stunning views of a winter wonderland on Mars, but this is no ordinary snowfall. Instead, the south pole of Mars is covered in layers of ice and carbon dioxide dust, according to THATcreating a fascinating scene in the southern region of the planet, Australe Scopuli.
In the winter season on Mars, temperatures drop to -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 comes in two flavors: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. On the one hand, water ice turns into gas before hitting the surface, due to the planet’s thin atmosphere; Dry ice, on the other hand, reaches the surface.
Although it looks like a winter wonderland, the images were taken in June, when it was almost summer at the south pole of Mars. According to an ESA releaseThe Sun’s warm rays are causing the seasonal ice sheets to begin their retreat, evident on the left side of the image, where dark spots appear.
As sunlight shines through the translucent top layers of dry ice, the ice at the bottom sublimes (turns into vapor directly from a solid state) and creates pockets of trapped gas. The pressure builds until the ice layers on top begin to crack, sending jets of gas across the surface, carrying dark dust from below. After breaking through, the dust falls back to the surface in the shape of a fan guided by the wind.
In the top view of Australe Scopuli’s seasonal polar caps, layers of ice and dust overlap in a swirling dream on the Martian surface. The image was captured by Mars Express’s high-resolution stereo camera, allowing 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 bursts, creating boundaries between the layered deposits.
ESA’s Mars Express was launched in 2003 and has provided stunning images of the Martian landscape for more than 20 years. The spacecraft compiled the most complete map of the chemical composition of Mars’ atmosphere, observed the planet’s moons Phobos and Deimos in detail, and traced the history of water on Mars. according to ESA. The mission also carried a lander called Beagle 2, but it was lost upon arrival and never conducted scientific operations on the Red (or, apparently, white) Planet.
