It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas—on Mars. The landscape of the rest of the world is, for the most part, a distinct red color, but recent images reveal unusual snow features that have turned the southern part of the Red Planet white.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter has captured stunning views of a winter wonderland on Mars, but this is not your ordinary snow. Instead, the South pole of Mars is covered by layers of carbon dioxide ice and dust, according to the ESA, which creates a pleasant area in the southern region of the Australe Scopuli.
Winter on Mars sees temperatures drop as low as -190 degrees Fahrenheit (-123 degrees Celsius). As cold as it is, Mars doesn’t get more than a few meters of ice. Unlike ice on Earth, Martian ice comes in two forms: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. On the other hand, water ice turns to gas before it touches the surface, due to the planet’s thin atmosphere; On the other hand, dry ice comes to the surface.
Although it looks like a winter wonderland, these photos were taken in June, when summer is approaching in southern Mars. According to an ESA release, the Sun’s warming rays are causing the seasonal ice caps to begin retreating, which can be seen on the left side of the image where the dark spots are entering.
As sunlight shines through the shiny surface of the dry ice, the underlying ice undergoes deformation—turning into vapor from a solid surface—and creates pockets of trapped gas. The pressure increases until the layers of ice above begin to crack, erupting jets of gas upwards, carrying black dust from below. After the eruption, the dust then returns to the surface in a fan-shaped pattern driven by the wind.
In this above view of the Australe Scopuli seasonal ice caps, layers of ice and dust accumulate in a swirling crater on the Martian surface. The image was captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express, which allows the landscape to be captured from a digital spatial model. The photo gives a closer look at the fan-shaped pattern created by the dust explosion, which forms the 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, looked at the planet’s moons Phobos and Deimos in detail, and traced the history of water throughout Mars, according to ESA. The mission also carried a host named Beagle 2, but it was lost on arrival and did not perform scientific missions on the Red (or, apparently, the White) Planet.
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