While the northern hemisphere of Earth experiences the winter solstice this week, there are also snowy winter scenes to be found on Mars.
With average temperatures around minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping as low as minus 220 degrees Fahrenheit, Mars is a chilly place generally, and is particularly so around the poles and during the winter. NASA recently shared a selection of photographs of Mars taken from orbit which show the winter weather to be found on our neighboring planet.
“Enough falls that you could snowshoe across it,” said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement. “If you were looking for skiing, though, you’d have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface.” “Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped,” Piqueux said. “Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.”
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