surface of Mars



If we are looking today on Mars we can notice that its atmosphere is absolutely transparently and very thin. We don’t see any clouds of water vapor. Clouds that are found on the planet surface are made mainly from carbon dioxide and dust. The small gravity of the planet causes that the dust storms are longer in time than their cousins on Earth. Turning of the clouds also provide moving of the weather perturbations over large regions on Mars.



What Made the Planet’s Atmosphere Change?



To semi-automate the process of performing a variety of measurements on craters and crater populations, computer software are being developed. And this is believed to allow for the rapid measurement of large numbers of impact craters for the purpose of investigating planetary surfaces. A part of this program has already been used to study “the Hematite Region” (Sinus Meridiani) on Mars. This is one of several areas on Mars which are interesting because it has evidence of the presence of water.



Further, NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter suggests new finding that Mars may be going through a period of climate change. The Odyssey has been tracking seasonal changes, such as the advance and retreat of polar dry ice. Besides this, the orbiter is returning evidence useful for learning about longer-term dynamics. It has been claimed that the amount of frozen water near the surface in some relatively warm low-latitude regions on both sides of Mars’ equator appears too great to be in equilibrium with the atmosphere under current climatic conditions.



The new pictures, taken by the NASAs Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft during the past year, are perplexing by themselves. “There are very young land forms that are associated with active water or ice processes on the surface of the planet. And these pictures just whet our appetites to spend more time documenting numerous such features and try to document their relationships so we can understand them”, said Victor Baker, a hydrologist and planetary scientist at the University of Arizona.



View this picture of Mars taken from Galaxy Picture Library. It clearly talks of the changing atmosphere of the Red Planet. Text copyright Robin Scagell. MOC images of the south polar cap taken in 1999 were compared with images of the same locations taken in 2001, and it was discovered that pits had enlarged, mesas had shrunk, and small buttes had vanished.



Recent findings show that Mars must have been completely different before. The atmosphere must have been denser, and the temperatures higher. A denser atmosphere with a lot of water vapor caused a greenhouse effect that kept the temperatures much higher than they are today.



Future Changes of Mars



From various observations, it seems that the future of Mars, however, has a brighter outlook. The ever-increasing solar radiation will increase the temperature, and gases will be released and create a denser atmosphere. Eventually Mars is likely to become a wet and blue planet. At that time, Earth will have become uninhabitable, and our descendants will have perhaps escaped to Mars. There are future visions of extracting gases from the bedrock on Mars and thus making the atmosphere denser. Greenhouse gases will increase the temperatures.



Ice cover will change over just two years. Pictures of pits and other features on Mars’ South Pole captured by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) show this. Gas exchange between the atmosphere and the frozen ices at the poles could have significant effects on the planet’s long-term climatic stability, analysis of the data indicates.