Climate of Mars

Recent evidence gathered by China’s Zhurong rover points to a dramatic climate shift on Mars—a finding that could have a significant impact on our understanding of Earth’s climate evolution.Teyonah Parris and John Boyega on Working With Jamie Foxx | io9 InterviewChina’s Zhurong Mars rover collected rare evidence from the planet’s sand dunes that show a change in the direction of the wind, eroding the dunes’ crescent shape that formed during the glacial era. Instead, dark, longitudinal ridges now lay on top of the dunes…

The sky is a hazy shade of—er, summer—on Mars, as captured in a new image by NASA’s Perseverance rover.Mars has four seasons, like Earth does, but they are a bit different from what we experience on our wet, life-filled planet. A Martian year is 687 Earth days, made up of 668 Mars sols, so its seasons last longer, too. They’re also more inconsistent than ours: In the Martian northern hemisphere, spring lasts 194 days, while autumn lasts only 142 days. Mars’ atmosphere is just 1% the density ofEarth’s, and the entire…

A balancing rock spotted by Perseverance.Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASUThe Red Planet is desolate, freezing, and has an atmosphere 1% as dense as our own. Its winds blow in great gusts that kick up global dust storms that make and break Mars missions that rely on solar energy for power.Thankfully, spacecraft on and above Mars keep us Earthlings up-to-date on the Martian weather and the best sightseeing of Martian wanderlust. Whether through the zoomed-in oculus of Perseverance’s WATSON camera or the all-seeing eye of the…

Two cameras on the Mars Express orbiter captured images of a series of dust storms near the Martian North Pole in 2019. Analysis of the images indicates that big clouds of dust on Mars formed similarly to water vapor clouds on Earth—an unintuitive finding, given how different the planets are.Most clouds on Earth are (obviously) not dust; they’re voluminous collections of cold water vapor. They form because of the water cycle and conditions of Earth’s atmosphere. Mars’ atmosphere is much colder than Earth’s and just 1% as…

The Curiosity rover spotted these Martian clouds on March 19, 2021.Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSThe landscape of Mars is rocky and barren, but the planet’s skies sometimes hold clues to its past in the form of clouds. NASA’s new Cloudspotting on Mars project is a science initiative that lets the public be a part of some new research as the agency studies what happened to Mars’ atmosphere, now much thinner than it once was.Cloudspotting on Mars enlists citizen scientists with the goal of allowing everyday citizens to help…