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Snow Could Fall on Mars

Accepted submission by takyon at 2017-08-23 02:04:57
Science

Mars is extremely dry and cold, but may still experience snowfall [space.com] under certain conditions:

Mars is dry compared to Earth: Its cold nature makes it unlikely that any of the ice on the Red Planet's surface would melt, and its extremely thin atmosphere would cause any liquid water on the surface to vaporize nearly immediately. Still, Mars' atmosphere does possess clouds of frozen water.

Previous research suggested that if snow did fall from those clouds, it would waft down very slowly. "We thought that snow on Mars [space.com] fell very gently, taking hours or days to fall 1 or 2 kilometers [0.6 to 1.2 miles]," said study lead author Aymeric Spiga, a planetary scientist at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris.

Now, Spiga and his colleagues have found that snow can rapidly descend on Mars in storms. "Snow could take something like just 5 or 10 minutes to fall 1 to 2 km [0.6 to 1.2 miles]," Spiga told Space.com.

The researchers were analyzing data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter [space.com] spacecraft when they noticed a strong mixing of heat in the Martian atmosphere at night "about 5 km [3 miles] from the surface," Spiga said. "This was never seen before."

Also at The Conversation [theconversation.com] and New Scientist [newscientist.com].

Snow precipitation on Mars driven by cloud-induced night-time convection [nature.com] (DOI: 10.1038/ngeo3008) (DX [doi.org])

Previously: NASA Observations Point to 'Dry Ice' Snowfall on Mars [nasa.gov]


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