by Water frost is visible at the equator of Mars for the first time. In this region of the Red Planet, which is equivalent to its tropics, it was previously believed that frost would be impossible.
The discovery could be crucial for modeling where water is on Mars and how it is exchanged between the Red Planet’s atmosphere and its surface. This could be crucial for future crewed exploration of Mars.
The water frost was seen by two European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft, first by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), which arrived at Mars in 2016, and then by the Mars Express mission, which is exploring the Red Planet from orbit . since 2003.
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The frost is located within the Tharsis area, the largest volcanic region on Mars, which contains 12 large volcanoes. This includes Olympus Mons, which is not only the highest volcano on Mars but also the highest peak in the solar system at a height of 18.6 miles (29.9 kilometers), making it about 2.5 times the height of Mount Everest, the mountain highest on. World.
Adomas Valantinas discovered “forbidden ice” on Mars as a PhD student at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
“We thought it was impossible for frost to form around the equator of Mars, because the combination of sunlight and a thin atmosphere keeps temperatures relatively high on the surface and on top of the mountain – unlike what we see on Earth, where you would expect to see frosted peaks,” Valantinas, now a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, said in a statement. “It’s exciting to be here and it suggests that there are exceptional processes going on that allow the frost to form.”
Patches of frost appear for a few hours around sunrise, then evaporate as sunlight shines on the Red Planet’s equator. The frost is also extremely thin, with a thickness equivalent to a human hair (about one-hundredth of a millimeter) thick. Despite this, however, the frost patches cover a wide area of each of the volcanoes, and their water content could fill about 60 Olympic swimming pools, close to 29.4 million gallons (111 million liters) of water.
This water is constantly exchanging between the surface and the atmosphere of Mars during each day, which is about 24 and a half hours long during the Red Planet’s cold season.
High mountain, deep caldera
The Tharsis region is home to several giant volcanoes that tower over the surrounding Red Planet’s Equatorial plains. Along with Olympus Mons, these peaks include the Tharsis Montes volcanoes known as Ascraeus, Arsia Mons, and Pavonis, the latter of which is about the height of Mount Everest.
The frost was seen on the Tharsis Olympus, Arsia Ascraeus Mons and Ceraunius Tholus volcanoes.
Each of these volcanoes has deep hollows at their summits called “calderas” which are created as magma chambers during eruptions. The team thinks that the peculiar way air plays over the Tharsis region creates a microclimate with the calderas that is unique from the wider climate where the volcanoes sit. It is these microclimates that allow patches of frost to form.
“Winds travel up the slopes of the mountains, bringing relatively moist air from near the surface up to higher altitudes, where it condenses and settles as frost,” Nicolas Thomas, Principal Investigator of the TGO Color and Surface Stereo Imaging System ( CaSSIS) and a researcher at the University of Bern said in a statement. “We actually see this happening on Earth and other parts of Mars, with the same phenomenon that causes the seasonal Martian Arsia Mons Long Cloud.”
Thomas said that the frost the team saw on top of volcanoes on Mars appears to settle in the shaded regions of the calderas, particularly in regions with cooler temperatures.
Adomas explained that there are several reasons why this frost at the equator of Mars has so far avoided detection.
“First of all, we need an orbit that allows us to see a scene early in the morning. While both of ESA’s Mars orbiters – Mars Express and TGO – have such an orbit and can look in every day, many from other agencies are synced to the official site. sun and can only be viewed in the afternoon,” said Adomas. “Secondly, frost deposition is associated with colder Martian seasons, making the window to see it even narrower.”
That means in order to see the ephemeral frost, the team had to know exactly where and when to look for it or they got lucky.
“We happened to be looking for frost near the equator for some other research but we didn’t expect to see it on top of a Mars volcano!” Adomas him.
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“Finding water on the surface of Mars is always exciting, both for scientific interest and for its implications for human and robotic exploration,” said Colin Wilson, ESA project scientist for both ExoMars TGO and Mars Express. “However, this discovery is extremely interesting.”
Wilson added that the low atmospheric pressure on Mars creates a rare situation on the Red Planet, meaning that the planet’s mountain slopes are not usually colder than its plains. Despite this, this research shows that moist air blowing up mountain slopes can still condense into frost, which Thomas called a “phenomenon similar to Earth.”
“This discovery was made possible thanks to a successful collaboration between ESA’s Mars orbiter and additional modelling,” said Thomas. “Understanding exactly what phenomena are the same or different on Earth and Mars really tests and improves our understanding of the basic processes occurring not only on our home planet but in other places in the cosmos.”
The team’s research was published on Monday (June 10) in the journal Nature Geoscience.
