How is winter on Mars?.. NASA captures cubic snowflakes and huge dunes

Winter turns on Mars the red planet To new and different aspects, as temperatures drop at the poles of the planet to their lowest levels at minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit, according to what was revealed by NASA’s robotic vehicles on the planet regarding the coldest season, which includes snowflakes and huge dunes.

According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, it was Mars Exploration Vehicle It has been in orbit for more than 16 years and has returned more than 436 terabytes of data to NASA, as its mission is to search for evidence that water once flowed on the surface of Mars.

Martian snow comes in two forms: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. The former usually dissipates before it touches the ground while the latter reaches the surface. Snow occurs in the coldest parts of the planet, where surface missions cannot survive, so we don’t have Pictures of snow falling on Mars.

But the matter is different on Mars anyway regarding ice, which consists of carbon dioxide, where the particles in dry ice are bound in four shapes when frozen, not 6 limbs like on Earth.

“Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know that dry snowflakes will be cube-shaped,” said Sylvain Beccio, a Mars scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena.

The accumulated ice begins to melt, taking on unique shapes. The transparent ice allows sunlight to heat the gas beneath. This gas eventually explodes, sending fans of dust to the surface. Scientists have already begun to study this type of dune that forms as a result of this process.