Who would’ve thought that there are clouds on Mars? I, for one, have always thought that the Martian planet was just a barren red landscape. But apparently not, as NASA has given us all the meteorology lessons we never knew we wanted.
Thanks to the space agency, which treats us daily to its Astronomy Picture of the Day, us regular non-astronomy folk now know that Mars does, in fact, have floating cotton candy in the sky, just like here on Earth.
Today’s image depicts what astronomers call the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC) – a giant water-ice cloud that, according to NASA, can stretch over 930 miles / 1,500 kilometers in length and 93 miles / 150 kilometers in width.
AMEC forms daily downwind of Arsia Mons, a 12.4-mile / 20-kilometer-tall extinct Martian volcano. Around sunrise, the cloud begins developing on the western slope of the volcano and expands rapidly for some three hours. It then detaches from the volcano before evaporating as late-morning temperatures rise.
NASA has said that AMEC was first imaged by the Viking Orbiter 2 in 1977, but more recent images of the “strange” cloud have helped the agency observe it in greater detail.
According to Aster Cowart, a planetary geologist based at the Planetary Science Institute who processed today’s Picture of the Day, the image was taken in 2018 by the Mars Express.
The spacecraft, which is remotely controlled by the European Space Agency, was launched in 2004 to study the surface, atmosphere and climate of the Red Planet, with Cowart saying that the image was taken during its 18,627th orbit.
The Mars Express carries a High Resolution Stereo Camera, which features a “pushbroom” scanner design.
Instead of snapping a full 2D frame all at once like a traditional camera, the HRSC contains nine charge-coupled device (CCD) detectors that scan the Martian surface line by line, relying on the orbiter’s movement to capture the next line.
This enables Mars Express to beam back multi-angle, near-simultaneous 3D stereo imagery alongside four distinct color channels (red, green, blue and near-infrared) in a single pass.
NASA has said that it will continue to study AMECs using the Mars Express to better understand how they form, but also in the hope that it may reveal secrets of how clouds form on Earth, too.
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