Falling snow spotted above Mars

Scientific American ^ | 9/30/08 | John Matson

[BigEdLB]

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, having already uncovered water ice in the soil of the Red Planet's northern polar plains, has now spotted another sight familiar to those of us who dwell in the higher latitude climes back on Earth: falling snow.

Using lidar (analogous to radar, with pulses of laser light standing in for radio waves), Phoenix picked up signs of snow drifting down from clouds some 2.5 miles (four kilometers) overhead. It has not been seen reaching the Martian surface; it appears to vaporize before landfall.

[BigEdLB]

This is more evidence of a Bush coverup. Global warming is real, and I wonder if the snow is really some hanging chads from Florida where the election was stolen from me. They must have trasferred those chads to Mars.

[aroostook war]

Mars must be beautiful this time of year. All that snow. Brrr!

[Red_Devil 232]

Brrr is right! And Santa will be coming soon!

[BigEdLB]

Maybe we cn all chip in and send Algore on the next mission....

[Westlander]

[martin_fierro]

[Westlander]

http://astro.sci.uop.edu/~harlow/weather/mars.html

[Mr_Moonlight]

Wax 'em up, baby!

[Westlander]

[aroostook war]

“When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter....”
“Groundhog Day”

[Roscoe Karns]

[Repeal The 17th]

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids...
In fact it’s cold as hell...
And there’s no one there to raise them if you did...

[Verginius Rufus]

I'm glad they explained what lidar is. I never really understood why aliens would get out of their UFOs and say "take me to your lidar."

[adorno]

In fact it’s cold as hell...

And all of my life, I always thought of hell as too damn hot.

[onedoug]

Mars almost had to be,
otherwise how alone we’d seem
without comparative geology.

[Jessarah]

This may be a stupid question, but I’m wondering when they say “snow” do they really mean H20, or is it some other molecular combination that is frozen and falling from the sky?

[Beowulf9]

I’ve wondered the same thing. From another article on the internet on this I’m gathering they really do mean water, as it says ‘water ice’

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/science/space/30marsw.html?ref=space

The weather station, by shining a laser beam straight up and looking at the reflections, has spotted crystals of water ice — snow — from clouds 2.5 miles above the surface, although the snow has so far not reached the ground.

As the season moves to winter, the Phoenix will eventually be encased in a tomb of carbon dioxide ice. Mission managers said that after the spacecraft thaws out when spring returns, they will attempt to invoke its “Lazarus mode,” but they doubted the spacecraft would revive.

Mr. Goldstein said the extreme cold would make electronic components brittle and prone to shattering. “The vehicle will probably not survive that,” he said.