[/caption]
Changing seasons in Mars’ northern hemisphere brings a change in the weather, and the clouds have rolled in to cover part of the polar surface in this intriguing image from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft.
Mars Odyssey’s THEMIS visual imager (VIS) captured this image on Jan. 24, 2012, as it passed over the Red Planet’s northern pole during one of its 2-hour-long orbits.
Clouds on Mars have been seen before, both from orbit and from the surface. They are made up of fine water ice particles and are usually at altitudes of 10 to 15 km high. Read more about Martian weather here.
The full THEMIS scan of the area is below.
The area imaged is about 21 km wide by 73 km high (13 x 45 miles).
Image credit: NASA / JPL / Arizona State University. Hat-tip to Mr. Bill Dunford at Riding With Robots (@ridingrobots).
Untangling what happened in our Solar System tens or hundreds of millions of years ago…
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Apollo astronauts set up a collection of lunar seismometers…
The dwarf planet Ceres has some permanently dark craters that hold ice. Astronomers thought the…
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles accelerated to extreme velocities approaching the speed of light. It…
NASA is in the business of launching things into orbit. But what goes up must…
A new theory suggests that Titan's majestic dune fields may have come from outer space.…