January 9th, 2009
A Phoenix footnote
Posted by
chrislintott in
Mars
Remember Phoenix’s discovery of snow on Mars?. In the last public talk of the AAS conference yesterday, Principal Investigator Peter Smith updated those of us who normally think about galaxies rather than planets on Phoenix’s mission and the analysis that’s underway. There wasn’t too much new to say, but he did let slip that late in the mission they did detect falling ice not only high in the atmosphere, but actually reaching the ground.
So not only does it snow high up on Mars, but at least at the northerly latitude of Phoenix it hits the ground too. An amazing thought, isn’t it?
on January 14th, 2009 at 1:20 am
Itd be interesting to know how the lower gravity of Mars effects snow flake formation, for example are snow flakes larger on mars than here on earth