Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Snow On Mars!

Yep, you read that correctly!

From NASA:

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds. Spacecraft soil experiments also have provided evidence of past interaction between minerals and liquid water, processes that occur on Earth.

A laser instrument designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars has detected snow from clouds about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) above the spacecraft's landing site. Data show the snow vaporizing before reaching the ground.

Sadly, the Phoenix mission will be coming to an end shortly. You can see from the short video at the link above that the sun barely rises above the horizon at the Phoenix landing site near the north pole of Mars.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A merry little Christmas to all the Martians out there, then! :-)

The snow is out there! ;-)