NASA explores a winter wonderland on Mars

, or dry ice. Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground.

"Enough falls that you could snowshoe across it," said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena."If you were looking for skiing, though, you'd have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface."

Snow falls and ice and frost form on Mars, too. NASA’s spacecraft on and orbiting the Red Planet reveal the similarities to and differences from how we experience winter on Earth. Mars scientist Sylvain Piqueux of JPL explains in this video. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechSnow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars: at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night. Cameras on orbiting spacecraft can't see through those clouds, and surface missions can't survive in the extreme cold.

The HiRISE camera captured this image of the edge of a crater in the middle of winter. The south-facing slope of the crater, which receives less sunlight, has formed patchy, bright frost, seen in blue in this enhanced-color image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of ArizonaBecause of how water molecules bond together when they freeze, snowflakes on Earth have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: The way in which atoms arrange themselves determines a crystal's shape.

"Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped," Piqueux said."Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair."Water and carbon dioxide can each form frost on Mars, and both types of frost appear far more widely across the planet than

NASA Me: Wait, snow means water right? NASA: Haha, no. Dry ice snow. Me:

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