The European Space Agency has released a photo of the Martian clouds. Even snow sometimes falls out of them.
The automatic interplanetary station ExoMars-TGO of the joint mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) and Roskosmos has photographed the clouds located above the Tharsis Bulge volcanic plateau - in the region of the Martian equator. The picture was taken a year ago - when the station flew up to Mars. ESA released the photo just the other day.
The image with a resolution of 20.35 meters per pixel covers an area stretching for 58 kilometers. The clouds floating above it look like a blue-white haze and, as experts believe, consist of microscopic grains of water ice.
The sky on Mars is by no means cloudless: the blue-white haze is the Martian clouds. Low variety.
The picture was taken from a height of 1,791 kilometers, while the station was rushing at a speed of 1953 kilometers per hour. The clouds themselves hung about 10 kilometers from the Martian surface.
The ExoMars-TGO station had two tasks. The first is to leave the TGO in orbit. It is designed to study the atmosphere and to communicate with rovers and scientific platforms to be sent to the Red Planet in the near future. The second task is to gently land the Schiaparelli demonstration landing module on the surface of Mars.
With TGO, everything went well, although the process of deceleration of the probe in the rarefied atmosphere of Mars has not yet ended. Schiaparelli, however, crashed due to a software bug.
Clouds, but much higher altitude, also hit the lens of another European Mars Express station, which is now in Mars orbit. The station took several pictures. Some of the cloud layers imprinted on them stretch as far as 1,500 kilometers. Up to these layers - 50-80 kilometers.
Promotional video:
High-altitude Martian clouds. Their layers are located 50-80 kilometers from the surface.
What are high-altitude clouds made of? The specialists are not yet ready to answer. Perhaps the layers are formed by ice particles, like their lower cousins. And perhaps there is dust at the top. Or even frozen carbon dioxide.
AT THIS TIME
A blizzard blows on Mars at night
According to French geophysicists at the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, Martian clouds not only decorate the local landscape. At times they become sources of precipitation. Specifically - snow, which falls mainly at night.
The climate models used by the French have clarified the mechanism of the phenomenon.
It gets colder on Mars at night. The clouds are also cooled, which as a result sink lower. Closer to the surface, they meet with warmer updrafts, particles of water ice in the clouds lose their stability and fall out with snow. The wind, whose speed on Mars sometimes reaches 10 meters per second, raises a blizzard. It reaches its maximum by two in the morning.
And on Mars in the morning everything is white.
According to the head of the study, Dr. Aymeric Spiga (Dr Aymeric Spiga), Martian blizzards are not harmless. They are able to harm the future conquerors of the neighboring planet - to complicate movement on the surface and create problems during landing.
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY