NASA’s Mars InSight lander and Curiosity rover have been doing a lot of skygazing and they sent back some pretty impressive images of clouds.
It’s already a known fact that it doesn’t rain on Mars, but CNET writes that we might be a little closer to figuring out how can this cold Red Planet have such interesting cloudy days.
Taking a closer look at Mars’ clouds
Recent research has been conducted by Victoria Hartwick who is a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder and she took a closer look at the mysterious clouds that are forming in Mars’ middle atmosphere at about 18 miles above the ground.
“Clouds don’t just form on their own,” Hartwick said. “They need something that they can condense on to.”
The secret might be “meteoric smoke,” icy dust that forms when space rocks are flying into the planet’s atmosphere.
There are several tons of space debris that typically crashes into Mars on a daily basis and Hartwick says that as meteors fall, the dust goes flying.
On our planet, the particles of dust can act as seeds that water vapor condenses around to form the clouds. It has just been revealed that a similar action could be happening on Mars as well.
It’s also been reported that researchers have run computer simulations of the atmosphere of the planet.
The clouds appeared in the simulations only when the team included meteors in the calculations. The team published the findings just the other day in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Martian Clouds on sol 145 : They see me rollin' 🙂 @MarsCuriosity @NASAInSight @InSight_IPGP pic.twitter.com/GvPo8IVmZA
— Paul Hammond (@PaulHammond51) April 25, 2019
Taking a look at the Mars clouds can offer scientists more details about how its atmosphere interacts with its climate and at the same time is also gives us clues about its warmer, wetter past.
The images of Mars’ clouds are indeed something soothing to watch as you can see in the tweet above.
Rada attended the courses in the Faculty of Letters, Romanian-English section, and finished the Faculty of Theatre and Television, Theatrical Journalism section, both within the framework of BabeÅŸ-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. Up ’til now, she reviewed books, movies, and theatre-plays, enjoying subjects from the cultural niche. Her experience in writing also intersects the IT niche, given the fact that she worked as a content editor for firms that produce software for mobile devices. She is collaborating with online advertising agencies, writing articles for several websites and blogs.