Posted on 07/02/2009 4:33:14 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
The planet Mars conjures images of red rocks and arid, dusty plains, but as NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander showed last year, it snows on Mars.
The stationary robot observed ice crystals falling to the martian surface near the end of its 5-month mission in the arctic Vastitas Borealis plains last year. Today, scientists detail this finding and others in a set of four papers in the journal Science. The research could help shed light on the past and present action of water on the martian surface and characterize the potential habitability of the red planet.
Phoenix landed on the red planet on May 25, 2008, with a mission to dig up and analyze samples of Martian dirt, confirm the existence of a subsurface layer of water ice and observe the weather at its far northern locale.
Cirrus clouds...
Spacecraft orbiting Mars had previously detected clouds high up in the Martian atmosphere and low-level "ice fog," "but they've never seen precipitation," said James Whiteway of York University in Canada, the lead scientist for Phoenix's meteorological instruments.
...
The clouds were low-level, wispy clouds made up of ice crystals, similar to the cirrus clouds that form over the Earth's polar regions in the winter. Whiteway also likened them to the thin clouds jet planes fly through high in the Earth's atmosphere.
"The thin, wispy clouds up there have a similar water content," he told SPACE.com.
The clouds didn't begin forming until around sol (Martian day) 80 or 90 of the mission, when air temperatures were cool enough for water vapor in the atmosphere to condense out, Whiteway explained.
As the mission wore on, the clouds became thicker, lower to the ground and persisted for longer.
...and snow
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Winter Olympics 2076 Mars..
Terraform or Bust!
Total Recall if I remember correctly... ;-)
The Red Planet was another movie that touched on this.
It’s certainly something I could support, if it could be done relatively inexpensively.
At one point they were talking about the soil being much like that on earth, in general terms. Did they change their opinion on that?
We have to break lightspeed, or break liberal strongholds here on Earth. Those are the only two options.
Can we PLEASE settle Mars quickly, and leave all of the liberals back here?
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The atmosphere of Mars is roughly equal to the earth atmosphere 1 mile above the top of Mount Everest. You can't breath it. When is this fantasy going to end?
I’ve seen ice fog in Wyoming. 20 below seems to be cold enough to do the trick.
Yup. It can freeze onto your antenna and the accumulation makes it hum, sometimes very loudly.
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