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Judi Lynn

(160,217 posts)
Tue Aug 22, 2017, 09:33 PM Aug 2017

Nighttime Snowstorms May Swirl Across Mars

By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com Contributor | August 22, 2017 12:37pm ET

- click for image -

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Mars may experience snowstorms at night, a new study finds, suggesting that the Martian atmosphere is far more active than previously thought.

Mars is dry compared to Earth: Its cold nature makes it unlikely that any of the ice on the Red Planet's surface would melt, and its extremely thin atmosphere would cause any liquid water on the surface to vaporize nearly immediately. Still, Mars' atmosphere does possess clouds of frozen water.

Previous research suggested that if snow did fall from those clouds, it would waft down very slowly. "We thought that snow on Mars fell very gently, taking hours or days to fall 1 or 2 kilometers [0.6 to 1.2 miles]," said study lead author Aymeric Spiga, a planetary scientist at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris. [Photos: Most Powerful Storms of the Solar System]

Now, Spiga and his colleagues have found that snow can rapidly descend on Mars in storms. "Snow could take something like just 5 or 10 minutes to fall 1 to 2 km [0.6 to 1.2 miles]," Spiga told Space.com.

More:
https://www.space.com/37901-nighttime-snowstorms-swirl-across-mars.html?utm_source=notification

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