Category Archives: Mars

You can watch Mars and Jupiter appear to practically high-five each other in the early-morning sky this weekend with the bright planets reaching their closest on Monday (May 29).

Mars and Jupiter will appear only 0.6 degrees apart in the eastern-southeastern sky, in the constellation Pisces, about 45 minutes before dawn local time, according to NASA (opens in new tab).They will get at their closest at 4:57 a.m. EDT (0857 GMT) on Monday, although you can also see them relatively close on Tuesday (May 30). Venus and Saturn will also be visible near the super-close planets.

These close approaches "never fail to impress during observations, particularly when the gas giants are involved," Mitzi Adams, an astronomer and researcher at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said in the agency statement Thursday (May 26).

Related:The brightest planets in the night sky: How to see them (and when)

Jupiter will be the brighter of the pair, shining at magnitude -2.2, while Mars will be at a still respectable 0.7. (By comparison, the faintest stars usually visible by the human eye are magnitude 6, and the full moon shines at magnitude -12.6. Magnitude is the scale astronomers use to measure an object's brightness in the sky.)

The two planets are appearing so close because they travel on the plane of the solar system, also known as the ecliptic. The moon, sun and major planets appear to therefore pass across the same pathway in Earth's sky, and sometimes produce eclipses when one world passes across another (or the moon moves into our planet's shadow during a lunar eclipse.)

But in reality, as NASA points out, both planets are millions of miles (or kilometers) away from us. Mars will be roughly 136 million miles (219 million km) from Earth, while Jupiter is four times further. By comparison, the Earth-sun distance is 93 million miles (150 km).

See Venus and the moon?

If you take a photograph of Mars and Jupiter let us know! You can send images and comments in to spacephotos@space.com.

Conjunctions are very common in Earth's sky and as summer approaches, you should be able to see as many as five naked-eye planets in the predawn sky all at once: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. (Strong telescopes may also show Uranus and Neptune.)

If you're looking for binoculars or a telescope to see planets in the night sky, check our our guide for the best binoculars deals and the best telescope deals now. If you need equipment, consider our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography to prepare for the next planet sight.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom (opens in new tab)or Facebook.

Go here to see the original:

See Mars and Jupiter shine super-close in the predawn sky this Memorial Day weekend - Space.com

Now we can factor erosion on the Red Planet into our search for life on Mars.

A new study attempts to find periods of more intense erosion on Mars in hopes of understanding when water flowed on the world's surface. Water can carry larger pieces of rock into collisions, breaking the rocks faster, so accelerated erosion might be a signal of watery, and in turn potentially habitable, conditions.

As rock eroded, the resulting dust blew into craters and settled down, providing a potential measurement point to assess erosion on Mars, according to the researchers.

Related: A brief history of Mars missions

The study probed the different types of rocks available on Mars and possible erosion rates. The planet is mainly covered with a fine layer of talcum-like dust, with elements including sodium, potassium, chloride and magnesium. Below the dust is a crust that is mostly made up of volcanic basalt rock, while a largely dormant mantle beneath contains silicon, oxygen, iron, and magnesium.

"Our study determines the timing and rates of sediment erosion and accumulation over Mars' geologic history in a completely novel way, and for the first time quantifies a measure of the erodibility of each of the types of rocks we see on Mars surface," lead author Andrew Gunn, a lecturer in the Monash University school of Earth, atmosphere and environment, said in a university statement (opens in new tab).

"We show that the abundance of sands blown by wind into craters on Mars' surface can be linked to the climate history of the planet, unlocking a new way to understand when in geologic time Mars may have been habitable," Gunn added.

One common proxy for assessing erosion rates is to use "crater counting", or estimating the number of craters on the surface and then assessing their age by how eroded they are. The complication, however, is that rates of erosion may change over time.

The new study used several datasets, including information from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) that ran aboard the NASA Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft that operated at the planet between 1997 and 2006. Scientists also gathered geology maps and climate simulations.

The aim was to estimate erosion through plotting the sedimentary cycle on Mars. Earth's plate tectonics "recycle" the surface, meaning that sediments are often buried over time. Mars, however, has no tectonics and should have a record of accumulations from ancient times to the present day.

Erosion tends to accelerate, the researchers noted, as rocks collide in liquid conditions. This collision process would then produce sediment, but the sediment often needs to be broken down by water before it is light enough for the wind to pick the dust up.

The implication is there was running water involved in the process, the study suggests. "Seeing high rates of accumulation in a certain period of Mars' history indicates that it was much more likely there was active rivers eroding material then," Gunn said.

A study based on the research was published (opens in new tab) in the journal Geology on May 12.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace. Follow uson Twitter@Spacedotcomand onFacebook.

More here:

New Mars study traces erosion history on the Red Planet in search for water - Space.com

Enthusiasts lit up social media recently with images of what appeared to be a doorway into a hillside on Mars. Was it, some wondered, evidence that the red planet could be, or have been, inhabited by aliens? The door was imaged by Nasas Curiosity rover on May 7 on the slopes of Mount Sharp, the central massif within Gale crater, where it landed in 2012. Described on one website as a pharaonic tomb door, because of its resemblance to some ancient Egyptian remains, it is in fact only about one foot high.

It is hard to spot on the panoramic image mosaic of the hillside above, but it leaps out at the eye if you see the individual frame where it occurs, seen below. It does look like a doorway until you realise how small it is. And if you boost the contrast in the dark parts of the image, the picture just about reveals a solid rock face at the back of the shadowed interior. So as a gateway into the hollow hills of Mars, it doesnt lead very far.

Nobody with even a little geological experience is likely to mistake the feature as a door. A geologist would note the thin and slightly sloping repeated layers of sandstone making up the whole of the rock face, and would immediately expect that they were looking at the eroded remains of hardened sand dunes. These once covered the stream and lake sediments that Curiosity examined earlier in its gradual climb up through the layers of sedimentary rock making up Mount Sharp.

A geologist would also spot the steep and fairly straight cracks running up the rock face, and recognise these as joints. These are fractures that typically open up when the weight of overlying rock layers is removed by erosion. There is a particularly obvious joint in the left of the door image, but several others can be made out including one that forms the smooth wall that lines up with the left side of the door itself. Theres another joint that forms the right side of the feature.

The whole hillside has been eroded back. The doorway is simply a place where the wind has been able to scour out the poorly consolidated sand and dust from the rock face a little more effectively, in an area bounded by the joints on either side. The base of an overlying bed of sandstone is the door lintel, and the sloping top of a bed of sandstone forms the gentle ramp that leads up to the door.

It doesnt take much searching on the internet to find images taken by Mars rovers that show rock formations that resemble other familiar objects, even though all are implausibly out of place. We should not be surprised that some of the innumerable rocks on Mars have weird shapes, because many have been sandblasted by wind erosion for billions of years.

Apart from doors and bits of hardware ranging from wrecked spaceships and a jet engine to individual items of cutlery, images have also captured pyramids, numerous humanoid heads, dinosaurs, various bones, and even a squirrel. Only a few of these strange objects are real, and those are all junk that humans put there. The others lose their visual distinctiveness if seen at closer range or from a different perspective.

Seeing the familiar even when it isnt there is a phenomenon called pareidolia. This denotes what happens when you see faces in the random pattern of your wallpaper, or peering out from the grain of wooden flooring, or in the clouds. The latter, for example, is whats causing Jupiter to look angry in the image below.

Seemingly mysterious objects dont occur solely on Mars. In December 2021, Chinas Chang'e 4 rover still doing great things on the on the lunar far side more than three years after landing spotted a hut shaped object 80 metres away. It duly trundled towards it, and revealed it to be just a boulder, presumably ejected from a nearby impact crater. Some say it looks like a crouching rabbit, but I doubt anyone is claiming that it was sculpted by aliens.

One of the most famous, and largest, examples of pareidolia is the Horsehead Nebula. This is a vast cosmic cloud of gas and dust, within which whole stellar systems are forming. An image collected in the right part of the spectrum and with an appropriate exposure time shows a shape that most people would recognise as a horses head. Shift wavelengths (which we can do) or look at it from a different direction (which we cant) and the recognisable shape will vanish.

Back on Earth, climbers high on Great Gable, a mountain in Cumbria, UK, often look out for Cat Rock, otherwise known as Sphinx Rock. Seen from below this looks like a sitting cat, and seen side-on it resembles the profile of the Sphinxs head. So far as I know, everyone accepts this as fluke and no one claims it as evidence that aliens have left landscape clues to their visits to Earth. It beats me why people persist in making such claims for flukey rock formations on Mars.

Ultimately, although you can generally believe your eyes, you should be cautious in believing your brains interpretation of what your eyes see.

Read more: Perseverance Mars rover: how to prove whether theres life on the red planet

Read more: Mushrooms on Mars? Five unproven claims that alien life exists

Link:

A 'doorway' on Mars? How we see things in space that aren't there - The Conversation

Baking a mixture of saltwater and materials that mimic dust from the moon or Mars at a high temperature produced sturdy bricks that could be used to build human habitats in space

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

The dust and loose rocks that make up the moons surface could make sturdy bricks

NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Bricks made of a mix of saltwater and dust from the moon or Mars can withstand enough pressure to be used in any future extraterrestrial construction. But astronauts planning on making these will need to figure out how to bake them first.

Ranajay Ghosh at the University of Central Florida and his colleagues wanted to know whether the dust and loose rocks on the moon and Mars, known as regolith, could be made into sturdy

See the article here:

Bricks made of dust from the moon and Mars could make space buildings - New Scientist

By: Bob OrkwisThursday, May 26, 2022 | 11:46 PM

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars Jack Dunham (9) celebrates with Wes Scurci after scoring against Quaker Valley during the WPIAL Class 2A championship game on Thursday at Robert Morris.

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars Austin Cote celebrates after scoring against Quaker Valley during the WPIAL Class 2A championship game on Thursday.

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars Austin Cote works past Quaker Valleys Ben Carlson during the WPIAL Class 2A championship game on Thursday.

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars Wes Scurci celebrates after scoring against Quaker Valley during the WPIAL Class 2A championship game on Thursday.

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars Carson Tomcik pressures Quaker Valleys Patrick Cutchember during the WPIAL Class 2A championship game on Thursday.

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars Austin Cote (22) celebrates with Wes Scurci after scoring against Quaker Valley during the WPIAL Class 2A championship game on Thursday.

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars Josh Seipp works past Quaker Valleys Christian Brown during the WPIAL Class 2A championship game on Thursday.

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars Wes Scurci (left) celebrates with Josh Seipp after scoring against Quaker Valley during the WPIAL Class 2A championship game on Thursday.

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars Connor Hartle works upfield against Quaker Valley during the WPIAL Class 2A championship game on Thursday.

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars Kyle McEwen watches his goal against Quaker Valley during the WPIAL Class 2A championship game on Thursday.

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars Wes Scurci scores against Quaker Valley goalie Calahan Bedard during the WPIAL Class 2A championship game on Thursday.

Christopher Horner | Tribune-Review

Mars seniors Austin Cote (left) and Quinn Fuller take hold of the WPIAL championship trophy after defeating Quaker Valley in the Class 2A final on Thursday at Robert Morris.

Around these parts, one for the thumb was a popular rallying cry for a couple of decades. The Mars boys lacrosse team already took care of that last season.

This year, the goal for the Fightin Planets was sixth consecutive WPIAL championship, and they reached that goal with a dominant 19-3 win over second-seeded Quaker Valley in the Class 2A finals Thursday night at Robert Morris Joe Walton Field.

The Quakers had the first opportunity in the game when, after a Mars turnover, the Fightin Planets were assessed a 30-second penalty. The Quakers came up empty, and when Mars answered with a man-up goal on its first chance, the Planets were off and running.

Our whole goal was to come out fast like we did against South Fayette, Mars coach Bob Marcoux said. We wanted to get up early and really set the tone and the pace. Sometimes that doesnt always go your way, but we just stuck with it.

Senior attack Wes Scurci, a US Lacrosse All-American, converted 2:57 into the game and Mars never looked back, opening an 18-0 lead in the fourth quarter before Quaker Valley found the net.

Scurci, who scored seven times on the night, has 72 goals on the season. The Lindenwood recruit also added an assist.

We just know from the power of our offense that once we get the ball, were going to be fine, Scurci said of the early man disadvantage. We stay calm in all of those situations.

Not to be outdone, fellow senior All-American Austin Cote notched five goals and added four helpers as top-seeded Mars improved to 19-1. Cote, who has 64 goals, is a Loyola (Md.) commit.

Junior attack Jack Dunham chipped in offensively with a pair of goals and four assists while classmate Kyle McEwen added two goals of his own. Senior Josh Seipp, who is also headed to Lindenwood, added three assists.

Archer Eubanks, Henry Wagner and Kyle Hammond scored for Quaker Valley (16-2). Hammonds goal was his team-leading 52nd of the season.

Mars has now won championships in 2016 (Division 2) and in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022. The 2020 season was cancelled due to the covid pandemic. The Mars title in 2017 also came against Quaker Valley.

Marcoux counted making the state playoffs as one of the main goals of the season for Mars.

Weve been kind of planning the season in three sections the first section the regular season, the second section was to get here (the WPIAL championship game). Weve really been trying to make sure we have everybody healthy as thats been an issue that weve had the last couple of rounds. Weve had some unfortunate injuries before.

The Mars victory was win No. 99 for Marcoux, who has been with the program for 10 seasons, spending the last five as head coach.

Both the Quakers and the Fightin Planets have qualified for the PIAA Class 2A playoffs along with South Fayette, which defeated Indiana, 8-4, in the consolation game.

Our practices are really competitive, Scurci said. I think thats most important.

Quaker Valley will play District 10 champion Cathedral Prep on Tuesday while Mars faces Cocalico, the fourth-place finisher from District 3.

Last year, Mars became the first team from District 7 regardless of classification or gender to appear in a lacrosse state championship game. The Fightin Planets lost that game 14-5 to Allentown Central Catholic, which became the first team from District 11 to win a lacrosse championship.

When Scurci was asked if this is when the pressure really starts for Mars, he replied succinctly, I think so.

The Upper St. Clair girls also won a spot in the state playoffs at Robert Morris on Thursday, defeating Pine-Richland in the Class 3A third-place game.

Tags: Mars, Quaker Valley

Read more:

Mars boys lacrosse rolls to 6th straight WPIAL title with another dominant performance - TribLIVE.com

The official ELEGOO Amazon storefront is offering its Mars 2 Pro Resin 3D Printer for $199.51 shipped with the on-page coupon clipped. Normally going for $300, this 34% discount marks a new all-time low weve tracked for this 3D printer, beating out the previous mention by $20. Resin 3D printing is a big leap for those already into filament-based printing with the finer resolution you get with resin. The total build volume is 129x80x160mm and it uses a 2K monochrome LCD to generate the mask for each layer that is then cured by the UV matrix below. A built-in active carbon filter will trap most of the fumes that come from resin while the machine is on. The Mars 2 Pro comes with an upgraded resin vat made from aluminum to be even sturdier. Keep reading for more.

The post-processing involved with resin 3D printing is much more intensive than filament-based printers and is a major time sink. You can get some assistance with this process by picking up the ELEGOO Mercury Plus 2-in-1 Washing and Curing Station for $130 with the on-page coupon clipped. The first step of post-processing is washing off the uncured resin and this is normally done with Isopropyl Alcohol. This station will stir the alcohol to get all the resin off. Then you can take the model and cure it with the UV light bar built into the station. This whole unit will make cleaning parts off much easier.

Be sure to stick around and take a look at the other deals weve rounded up today. With Memorial Day just a few days away, many brands are launching sales to celebrate, such as Ankers Gold Box with a selection of chargers, power banks, and accessories starting at $22.

ELEGOO Mars 2 Pro MSLA 3D Printer is ELEGOO first 6.08 inch LCD 3D Printer that uses monochrome LCD and COB UV light source. It has 50m XY precision and high printing speed at 1.5-2s/layer. Extra building volume can meet most of your printing needs from industrial parts to board game miniatures.

Subscribe to the 9to5Toys YouTube Channel for all of the latest videos, reviews, and more!

Continue reading here:

ELEGOOs Mars 2 Pro resin 3D printer with carbon filter and aluminum tank reaches $199.50 - 9to5Toys

The researchers point out that the regolith characteristics could help turn lava tubeshollow voids and caves on the surfaceinto hospitable human habitats.

These would provide protection from cosmic and solar radiation, and reduce exposure to extreme hot or cold temperatures, in much the same way as the cave dwellings at Coober Pedy, professor Andrew Dempster said in a media statement, referring to the South Australian town famous for its below-ground dwellings, which are bored into the hillsides due to the scorching daytime heat.

Dempster and his colleague Serkan Saydam are in charge of a project that includes a dirty thermal vacuum chamber, which will provide the best environment in Australia to test the characteristics of such regolith.

But even before the mineral, the techniques to mine a more important resource need to be mastered.

That resource is water but there are still many questions remaining about how much waterin the form of icethere is under the surface, and where exactly it is located.

This means that analyzing where the ice is in order to then be able to mine it, should be the priority task.

Dempster and Saydam point out that mining water will create an infrastructure that can then be used to properly investigate other extractive materials, such as minerals and rare-earth elements, including yttrium and lanthanum, as well as the isotope helium-3.

Depending on the economics, these rare-earth elements could then be transported back to earth where they are already being used in the motors of electric vehicles, and also in the generators used for wind turbines.

Mining on the surface of the moon or Mars will almost certainly need to be purely robotic, and wholly automated mining is not even currently possible on earth, so significant developments will need to be made before that is possible, Dempster said.

One solution could be to implement remote operation of the machinery, by a human on the lunar base for example, or even back on earth. This type of mining is already happening to a certain level in locations such as the Pilbara in Western Australia.

The researcher also noted that it is expensive to transport large mining equipment into space, so smaller machinery will likely need to be used, which in turn will need to be much more precise in excavating the material.

These smaller machines will also need to have more power than is currently required on earth in order to break the rocks.

Just 10 years ago the concept of off-earth mining was still completely new, but the rate of growth in terms of research and development has been significant, the scientists said.

Experts believe that off-earth mining, and potential subsequent colonization of the moon and Mars, are indeed realistic within the next 30 years.

More here:

Populating Mars, the moon requires two key resources to be mineable first - MINING.COM - MINING.com

We have a glimpse now of NASA's latest vision for its first crewed Mars mission.

The agency released (opens in new tab) its top objectives for a 30-day, two-person Mars surface mission on Tuesday (May 17) and asked the public to provide feedback on how the planning is going. Submissions were initially due on May 31, but that deadline was recently extended to June 3.

NASA aims to launch astronauts to Mars by the late 2030s or early 2040s. Making that vision a reality will be challenging. Assuming the funding and technology come into play at the right time, for example, the round-trip travel time would still be about 500 days given the distance between Earth and Mars.

Related: How living on Mars would challenge colonists (infographic)

Gravity or the lack thereof would also be a problem, as current-generation spacecraft look nothing like those seen in movies like "The Martian" (2015). The astronauts will arrive on the Red Planet after months in microgravity and face a significant road to recovery, even to operate in the partial gravity of Mars, which is roughly one-third that of Earth. NASA suggests that one way to address this issue might be having the crews live in a pressurized rover during their mission.

"We want to maximize the science so we allow them to drive around before they become conditioned enough to get in the spacesuits, and walk and maximize that science in 30 days," Kurt Vogel, NASA director of space architectures, said in a 30-minute YouTube video (opens in new tab) accompanying the data release.

The mission plan is in the early stages and could change considerably. But so far, NASA envisions using for a habitat-like spacecraft to ferry crewmembers to the Red Planet, using a hybrid rocket stage (powered by both chemical and electrical propulsion). Four people would make the long journey, with two alighting on the surface, somewhat similar to the model seen in the Apollo program with three astronauts.

Roughly 25 tons of supplies and hardware would be ready and waiting for the crew, delivered by a previous robotic mission. These supplies would include a crew ascent vehicle, already fueled and ready to go for the astronauts to make it off Mars and back into orbit around the planet.

NASA is not issuing a standard request for information or formal contract process for this mission concept yet. After all, the agency is focused on getting its uncrewed Artemis 1 mission off the ground to get ready for astronaut missions to the moon in the 2020s. (NASA has said the moon work is essential to getting ready for Mars.)

But more stakeholder input on Mars is forthcoming. The agency pledged to have a workshop in June "with partners from American industry and academia," who are invited individually by NASA. Invited international organizations can also weigh in during a workshop in July.

You can view more details (opens in new tab) about NASA's objectives (there are 50 in all) before submitting your comments on this website (opens in new tab), through June 3.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcom (opens in new tab)and onFacebook (opens in new tab).

Excerpt from:

NASA shows off early plans to send astronauts to Mars for 30 days - Space.com

We may have heard the last from China's Zhurong for a while, after the solar-powered Mars rover entered a dormant state due to winter's cold and local sand and dust storms.

Zhurong entered hibernation on May 18, with temperatures of around minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius) during the local Mars day and minus 148 F (minus 100 C) during the night, according to a statement from the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program. China's Tianwen 1 orbiter, which delivered Zhurong to Mars last May, also detected sand and dust storm activity over Zhurong's landing area in Utopia Planitia with its medium-resolution camera.

Zhurong has a few tricks in its design to help it withstand the challenges of winter temperatures and sand and dust storms. These measures include the ability to angle its solar panels to maximize sunlight collection and a special anti-dust coating on the panels.

Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover's 1st year on Mars

China's rover is not alone in its plight: NASA's InSight lander, which arrived on the Red Planet in November 2018, is also struggling to produce enough solar power to continue operations. In contrast, NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers can continue their journeys across the surface of Mars regardless of seasons, since they are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, a type of nuclear power.

China's Yutu rovers on the moon are commanded to enter a dormant state for lunar nights, which last about 14 Earth days. However, the Zhurong rover will be able to autonomously detect the improvement in solar energy levels and power up once more, according to Chinese officials

The rover is expected to resume activities again in December, with the onset of spring in the northern hemisphere and the clearing of local dust storms.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

View original post here:

China's Mars rover is hibernating through the harsh Red Planet winter - Space.com

Mars' planet-engulfing dust storms are being driven by a dramatic energy imbalance between seasons and even between day and night on the Red Planet, new research has found.

"One of the most interesting findings is that energy excess more energy being absorbed than produced could be one of the generating mechanisms of dust storms on Mars," said Ellen Creecy in a statement. Creecy is a doctoral student at the University of Houston and lead author of the new research.

Mars is famous for its dust storms, which tend to whip up during summertime in the planet's southern hemisphere. Often they can grow to encompass a substantial region of the Red Planet. For example, in January 2022, a dust storm covering nearly twice the area of the United States led to some of NASA's Mars missions having to be powered down until the storm passed. A global dust storm also put an end to the agency's Opportunity rover in 2018.

Related: A giant Mars dust pile is sculpted by the wind in this photo by a European probe

Planetary scientists have long pondered where the energy to drive these vast storms originates from. Solar heating clearly has something to do with it, given the connection between dust storms and southern summer, but the extreme nature of the storms suggests that it's more complex.

Now new research, based primarily on observations by NASA's now-defunct Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft, which operated from 1996 to 2006, and its Thermal Emission Spectrometer. The scientists also incorporated newer measurements of surface temperature from the Curiosity rover and the InSight lander, which are both still operating today. All told, the researchers found that dust storms are strongly related to the imbalance between the amount of solar energy being absorbed by Mars and the amount of energy it then re-radiates as heat.

In technical parlance, this relationship between absorbing and re-radiating heat is referred to as the radiation energy budget. It's different for each planet. The gas giant planets Jupiter, Saturn and so on have a large imbalance because their great distance from the sun means they receive relatively little solar energy, but they re-radiate a lot because they still have substantial amounts of interior heat left over from their formation.

Earth, on the other hand, has a small imbalance of between 0.2% and 0.4%, meaning that the amount of heat that the planet absorbs and the amount that it re-radiates back into space is about the same. This is thanks in part to the ability of our oceans and atmosphere to trap and redistribute heat around the planet.

The prevailing assumption had been that Mars also has a small imbalance, but the new work shows that is not the case, which can lead to marked differences between the two hemispheres, particularly during southern summer and northern winter.

In 2001, a global dust storm engulfed Mars, and MGS was on hand to study the storm in detail. The spacecraft found that during this great storm, there was an energy imbalance between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Red Planet of 15.3%. The extra energy absorbed by the southern hemisphere was more than enough to power the huge dust storms.

Furthermore, the imbalance between day and night is even more startling. During the 2001 dust storm, the global average emitted heat decreased by 22% from the global average (111.7 watts per square meter) during the day, but increased by 29% at night. The presence of heat-absorbing dust suspended in the atmosphere during the storm is partly responsible for this imbalance, but the main cause is the lack of large oceans or a thick atmosphere, the researchers said.

"Mars is not a planet that has any kind of real energy storage mechanisms like we have on Earth," Creecy said. "Our large oceans, for example, help to equilibrate the climate system."

Once upon a time, Mars had oceans and a thicker atmosphere itself, but the oceans dried up over 3 billion years ago and the atmosphere was mostly lost to space. This history implies that the energy imbalance and the dust storms that the imbalance drives are a product of climate change on Mars. Hence, Mars may provide a preview of what's in store for Earth, either if runaway climate warming takes hold, or about a billion years in the future when an aging sun will have grown too hot for oceans to exist on our planet.

Meanwhile, on Mars, the dust storm season will gear up again in the next few months, with the Red Planet's southern hemisphere passing its spring equinox in February 2022, according to the Planetary Society. This means there's no respite from the dust for the various rovers and landers on the Martian surface at least until the next southern winter in 2023.

The research is described in a paper published May 16 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Follow Keith Cooper on Twitter @21stCenturySETI. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

See the article here:

Massive Mars dust storms triggered by heat imbalances, scientists find - Space.com