Snow on Mars!

Its good news in terms of giving people a new point of view. Besides that, there is nothing interesting about a planet containing water in its past. It would be more weird if water was exclusive to earth in the universe.

Of course the water is not a problem by itself. Its the possibility of once having life on another planet some people are having hard time to deal with. You know a space size of billions of light years called universe was there only for human while human can not even travel beyond earth's moon :)

Scientists dont know much about planets in other star systems yet, but since we already know there is water and life in this solar system (on earth), it is more likely either or both once existed or will exist on another planet in this very solar system.

More news like this will give people a new perspective .

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Let it be forgotten as a long-forgotten snow.
Any Deaf Martians hear/here?
Fuggit, let's make Jay Leno crawl.
 
Wow, that is so neat to discover snow on Mars.
 
Yeah, awesome. I read about this recently. I hope we will come up with better technology for exploration and analysis soon.
 
RedFox said:
That would be fun because it'd be carbon dioxide snow.
Click to expand...

Not too sure as if carbon dioxide could create snow? I think it also requires oxygen to create snow? I wonder.

We do know that Mars hold more carbon dioxide, by the way.
 
It would be more fun if we throw snowballs at each other on Mars! ;)

Even digging a snow tunnel!

Making a ice rink for hockey and skating! :D
 
Liza said:
Yeah, awesome. I read about this recently. I hope we will come up with better technology for exploration and analysis soon.
Click to expand...

Oh yes we will. The cutting edge technology has rapidly improved every few months.

Much more improved cutting-edge technology + better analysis = Astounding results!
 
web730 said:
Not too sure as if carbon dioxide could create snow? I think it also requires oxygen to create snow? I wonder.

We do know that Mars hold more carbon dioxide, by the way.
Click to expand...

Sure, solid carbon dioxide can form at the right ranges of temperatures and pressures. It's the same thing as dry ice that they use as a refrigerant to keep ice cream cold.

Image:Dry Ice Pellets Subliming.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If you can see SVG pictures, here's a diagram showing the temperatures and pressures where CO2 is is a gas, liquid, solid or supercritical.

Image:Carbon dioxide pressure-temperature phase diagram.svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here's a regular image in case you can't see SVG ones.

Image:Carbon dioxide pressure-temperature phase diagram.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

At the line between the solid and gas areas, CO2 can sublimate, or change directly from solid to gas, like in CO2 fog machines. Water can do this, like when there is plenty of sunlight to make snow turn into water vapor and disappear into the air.

CO2 can also get deposited by changing from gas to solid, like with the formation of CO2 snow. Water does this too, like with the formation of snow in clouds or frost on the ground from water vapor.

Here's the structure of carbon dioxide ice showing how the CO2 molecules fit together with Van der Waals forces.

Image:Carbon-dioxide-crystal-3D-vdW.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Interestingly, crushing solid carbon dioxide with great pressures of 400 to 500 thousand atmospheres creates amorphous carbonia, a glass made of carbon dioxide. It is possible that large planets could have this glass inside.
 
RedFox said:
Sure, solid carbon dioxide can form at the right ranges of temperatures and pressures. It's the same thing as dry ice that they use as a refrigerant to keep ice cream cold.

Image:Dry Ice Pellets Subliming.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If you can see SVG pictures, here's a diagram showing the temperatures and pressures where CO2 is is a gas, liquid, solid or supercritical.

Image:Carbon dioxide pressure-temperature phase diagram.svg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here's a regular image in case you can't see SVG ones.

Image:Carbon dioxide pressure-temperature phase diagram.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

At the line between the solid and gas areas, CO2 can sublimate, or change directly from solid to gas, like in CO2 fog machines. Water can do this, like when there is plenty of sunlight to make snow turn into water vapor and disappear into the air.

CO2 can also get deposited by changing from gas to solid, like with the formation of CO2 snow. Water does this too, like with the formation of snow in clouds or frost on the ground from water vapor.

Here's the structure of carbon dioxide ice showing how the CO2 molecules fit together with Van der Waals forces.

Image:Carbon-dioxide-crystal-3D-vdW.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Interestingly, crushing solid carbon dioxide with great pressures of 400 to 500 thousand atmospheres creates amorphous carbonia, a glass made of carbon dioxide. It is possible that large planets could have this glass inside.
Click to expand...

Hmm interesting... cool thanks, RedFox!
 
Comparing the roles of carbon dioxide at Venus, Earth and Mars

Here's a comparison of Venus, Earth and Mars and how they've processed their carbon dioxide inventories.

Earth-Venus-Mars Comparison

Venus is closer to the sun, so it started out hotter, so the greenhouse effect made it hot enough to to evaporate any water it may have had, increasing the greenhouse effect (water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas) and baking carbon dioxide out of the rocks until it was all in the atmosphere, resulting in a roasting oven. The warming would raise the ceiling in the air at which water vapor turns into ice crystals. Once that ceiling was high enough, water molecules were able to float high enough to where energetic sunlight like ultraviolet rays could break it up, leaving Venus a dry planet blanketed in a hot carbon dioxide atmosphere.

Earth is further away, so the greenhouse effect didn't run away. Liquid water could exist and enable plenty of the carbon dioxide to get dissolved and converted to carbonate rocks like limestone. Water also enables plate tectonics by letting the plates slide more easily at subduction zones, so the plate tectonics plays its part in recycling the carbonates with volcanic activity. If Venus had any plate tectonics, it apparently locked up when the water was lost.

Mars is further away than Earth from the sun. Its smaller size made its interior cool down faster, locking up any plate tectonics it had. So the carbon dioxide that got incorporated into rocks when Mars had more water stayed locked up, so there isn't enough greenhouse effect to keep the planet warm.

Here, it says that Mars is colder than Earth would be if we moved Earth out to where Mars is. It's because Mars has only enough carbon dioxide to bump up the temperature by 5K.

Maybe we could engineer Mars someday to rearrange the rocks and atmosphere so we could live there. We might want to when the sun gets hotter as it ages. It's projected to go red giant in 5-7.5 billion years, but it'll be hot enough within a billion years to roast Earth. The extra heat will evaporate sea water, increase the greenhouse effect and bump up the ceiling of ice crystal formation. Once that is high enough, the water will get lost, drying out Earth.

I read the book this page discusses, so I learned a lot about how the extra heat will roast Earth. Looks like a good idea to try moving to Mars even if it could be hard. :D
 
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