Space Photos of the Week: Postcards From a Martian Winter
PHOTO01.04.2020 10:00 AM
NASA's HiRise camera captures white carbon dioxide frost on a scarlet wonderland.
This year will be a big one for the Red Planet, with the launch of NASA’s Mars 2020 rover from Cape Canaveral in Florida this summer. The rover isn’t due to land on Mars until February of 2021, but we can still enjoy the planet’s riches in the meantime. Although very much an alien world, it has a lot in common with our planetary home. The Red Planet has ice caps on its north and south poles, which grow in winter and melt some in summer. It has weather and seasons too, even if they don’t look quite like ours. That means the landscape is changing all the time, a metamorphosis that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance orbiter has been well-situated to document. Images captured by the satellite’s HiRise camera reveal just what a Martian winter looks like.
This year will be a big one for the Red Planet, with the launch of NASA’s Mars 2020 rover from Cape Canaveral in Florida this summer. The rover isn’t due to land on Mars until February of 2021, but we can still enjoy the planet’s riches in the meantime. Although very much an alien world, it has a lot in common with our planetary home. The Red Planet has ice caps on its north and south poles, which grow in winter and melt some in summer. It has weather and seasons too, even if they don’t look quite like ours. That means the landscape is changing all the time, a metamorphosis that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance orbiter has been well-situated to document. Images captured by the satellite’s HiRise camera reveal just what a Martian winter looks like.
Sand dunes in the northern polar region of Mars glimmer here in winter. The darker sand is basalt left over from ancient volcanic activity. The iconic red Martian terrain is speckled with a white-ish dusting of ice. Not unlike Earth’s seasonal weather, these white patches will eventually sublimate (turn from ice to vapor) during Mars’s summer months.PHOTOGRAPH: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
The scale of this photo makes it’s hard to tell how massive these sand dunes are. But if you look closely, in between the dunes you’ll see little specks that are actually giant boulders. In HiRise images, finer material such as very small-grained sand often shows up as darker features, which we can see scattered throughout this photo.PHOTOGRAPH: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
This image looks like something seen through a microscope, but no, this is a large swath of Martian terrain. This section of the South polar ice cap consists in part of frozen carbon dioxide, which melts over the summer months. The melting carbon dioxide ice reveals pockets of darker material below the surface.PHOTOGRAPH: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
Even for Mars, this is an odd one. It sort of looks like we are falling into a black hole here, but this is actually carbon dioxide frost mixed with Martian dust atop some dunes. As the small icy patches sublimate away, darker sandy material appears below.PHOTOGRAPH: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
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https://www.wired.com/story/space-photos-of-the-week-postcards-from-a-martian-winter/
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