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It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas – on Mars. The otherworldly landscape is, for the most part, a distinct red hue, but recent images reveal unusual cool features that have turned the Red Planet’s south pole white.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter has captured stunning views of a winter wonderland on Mars, but this isn’t your regular snowfall. Instead, the south pole of Mars is covered by layers of carbon dioxide ice and dust, according to ESAcreating the fascinating scene throughout the southern region of the Southern planet Scopuli.
The winter season on Mars sees 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 it hits the surface, due to the planet’s thin atmosphere; dry ice, on the other hand, reach 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 liberationthe sun’s warm rays cause the seasonal ice layers to begin their retreat, evident on the left side of the image where the dark pieces are swooping in.
When sunlight shines through the translucent upper layers of dry ice, the ice at the bottom sublimates—it turns into vapor directly from a solid state—and creates pockets of trapped gas. The pressure builds until the ice layers at the top begin to crack, sending jets of gas bursting to the surface, bringing the dark dust from below. After clearing its path, the dust returns to the surface in a fan-shaped pattern driven by the wind.
In the overhead view of the Austral Scopuli seasonal ice sheets, layers of ice and dust overlap in a turbulent dream on the Martian surface. The image was captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express, which allows 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 bursts of dust, creating boundaries between layered deposits.
ESA’s Mars Express was launched in 2003, and has been providing breathtaking images of the Martian landscape for more than 20 years. The spacecraft compiled the most comprehensive map of the chemical composition of the Martian atmosphere, observed the planet’s moons Phobos and Deimos in detail, and traced the history of water on Mars. according to the ESA. The mission also carried a lander called Beagle 2, but it was lost on arrival and has never conducted scientific operations on the Red (or, apparently, White) Planet.
