LATEST FACE OF MARS DRIVER
LATEST FACE OF MARS FULL

Southeast of Olympus Mons lies Valles Marineris, the red planet’s iconic canyon system. Mars has not only the highest highs, but also some of the solar system’s lowest lows. If you stood at the outer edge of Olympus Mons, its summit would lie beyond the horizon.

The peak is so massive, it curves with the surface of Mars. But the base of Olympus Mons is so wide-some 374 miles across-that the volcano’s average slope is only slightly steeper than a wheelchair ramp. Olympus Mons, the solar system’s largest volcano, towers some 16 miles above the Martian surface, making it three times taller than Everest. Like Earth and Venus, Mars has mountains, valleys, and volcanoes, but the red planet’s are by far the biggest and most dramatic. What shut down the Martian dynamo? Scientists are still trying to figure out. But in the ancient past-up until about 4.12 to 4.14 billion years ago-Mars seems to have had an inner dynamo powering a planet-wide magnetic field. The absence of this protective barrier makes it easier for the sun’s high-energy particles to strip away the red planet’s atmosphere, which may help explain why Mars’s atmosphere is now so thin. Mars also lacks an active plate tectonic system, the geologic engine that drives our active Earth, and is also missing a planetary magnetic field. Not so today: Though water ice abounds under the Martian surface and in its polar ice caps, there are no large bodies of liquid water on the surface there today. This means that at some point in the distant past, Mars’s atmosphere was sufficiently dense and retained enough heat for water to remain liquid on the red planet’s surface. Robotic rovers have found clear evidence that billions of years ago, lakes and rivers of liquid water coursed across the red planet’s surface. Once upon a time, though, wind and water flowed across the red planet. Despite the thin air, Martian breezes can gust up to 60 miles an hour, kicking up dust that fuels huge dust storms and massive fields of alien sand dunes. By Earth standards, the air is preposterously thin air pressure atop Mount Everest is about 50 times higher than it is at the Martian surface.

LATEST FACE OF MARS DRIVER

The primary driver of modern Martian geology is its atmosphere, which is mostly made of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon.

LATEST FACE OF MARS FULL

Surface temperatures on Mars can reach as high as 70 degrees Fahrenheit and as low as -225 degrees Fahrenheit, but on average, its surface is -81 degrees Fahrenheit, a full 138 degrees colder than Earth’s average temperature. There’s another complicating factor: Mars has a far thinner atmosphere than Earth, which dramatically lessens how much heat the planet can trap near its surface. On Mars, the northern hemisphere’s spring and summer are longer than the fall and winter. This annual variation affects the timing of the red planet’s solstices and equinoxes. In addition, Mars’s orbit is less circular than Earth’s, which means that its orbital velocity varies more over the course of a Martian year. The angle of Mars’s axis of rotation also changes much more often than Earth's, which has led to swings in the Martian climate on timescales of thousands to millions of years. On Mars, a year lasts 669.6 sols, or 687 Earth days, and an individual season can last up to 194 sols, or just over 199 Earth days. This means that it takes Mars longer to complete a single orbit, stretching out its year and the lengths of its seasons. For one, Mars is on average about 50 percent farther from the sun than Earth is, with an average orbital distance of 142 million miles. At two specific moments each year-called the equinoxes-both hemispheres receive equal illumination.īut for several reasons, seasons on Mars are different from those on Earth. Whichever hemisphere is tilted closer to the sun experiences spring and summer, while the hemisphere tilted away gets fall and winter. Mars’s axis of rotation is tilted 25.2 degrees relative to the plane of the planet’s orbit around the sun, which helps give Mars seasons similar to those on Earth. Mars rotates on its axis every 24.6 Earth hours, defining the length of a Martian day, which is called a sol (short for “solar day”). This video explains what makes it so different from Earth and what would happen if humans lived there. Recent NASA exploratory expeditions revealed some of the red planet's biggest mysteries.

Latest face of mars