Frosty Surprises Beyond Earth! NASA explores a winter wonderland on Mars

Not just on Earth, snow falls and ice and frost form on Mars, too. When winter comes to the Red Planet, the surface is transformed into a truly otherworldly winter wonderland.

Snowfall on Mars is limited to a few feet, most of which falls over extremely flat areas. Due to Mars' elliptical orbit, winter on the planet takes much longer to come around, with a single Mars year being equivalent to two Earth years.

Thanks to NASA's robotic Mars explorers, scientists have been able to observe and analyze some remarkable winter phenomena on the Red Planet.

Below are some of the findings shared by NASA on Martian winters:

Snow on Mars comes in two forms: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. The air on Mars is so thin and the temperatures so low that water-ice snow turns into a gas before it can reach the ground. However, dry-ice snow does make it to the ground.

According to NASA, snow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars - at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night. Unfortunately, cameras on spacecraft cannot penetrate the clouds, and surface missions cannot endure extreme cold. Therefore, no pictures of snow falling have ever been taken. Nevertheless, scientists are aware of its occurrence due to a few special scientific instruments like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Mars Climate Sounder, which can peer through cloud cover, and the Phoenix lander which used a laser instrument to detect water-ice snow falling to the surface.

Frost composed of both water and carbon dioxide can be seen on Mars much more frequently than snow. The Viking landers, which studied the planet in the 1970s, noticed water frost, and NASA's Odyssey orbiter has seen frost forming and evaporating in the morning sunlight.

A wondrous end!

Lastly, when the winter season comes to an end, a remarkable sight can be seen as the ice that has accumulated starts to melt away and evaporate into the air. This process creates some truly remarkable shapes, which have been likened to spiders, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, and Swiss cheese by scientists.