Brought to you by the Phoenix Lander
Well, this is cool! It looks like a procession of thin cirrus clouds here on Earth, but they’re actually floating above the Mars surface. The clip was made from a succession of ten images taken by the Surface Stereo Imager on the Phoenix Mars Lander, taken on August 29, 2008.
As in Earth’s atmosphere, these clouds are made up of water-ice particles. According to the folks on the lander team, these clouds give us a good look at the Martian water cycle. Here’s how it works: water vapor comes off the north pole during the peak of summer. The peak period of water-vapor abundance at the Phoenix site has just passed and there’s plenty of vapor available to form into clouds, fog and frost, which explains what the lander has been seeing. It will be interesting to watch clouds over the next few months as northern hemisphere autumn approaches.
NASA’s Opportunity Rover on Mars is leaving Victoria Crater, a place it has been exploring for nearly one Earth year. It looked back toward Cape Verde, a rock promontory that has intriguing layers of rock that the rover could study. Those layers are treasure troves of information about the environment that existed on Mars when they were laid down, and in the geologic eras after that when the rocks were affected by weathering and other processes.