The Shining Clouds of Mars
The Shining Clouds of Mars
It's amazing the similarities that can be found on our neighbor planet. This could easily be mistaken for an overcast day somewhere in Nevada. This photo was taken by Curiosity rover on March 19 2021 and is a tiled mosaic of 21 images.
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Huh. What are those clouds composed of? Certainly not water, right?
Some are actually, from JPL:
"Most Martian clouds hover no more than about 37 miles (60 kilometers) in the sky and are composed of water ice. But the clouds Curiosity has imaged are at a higher altitude, where it’s very cold, indicating that they are likely made of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice."
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-curiosity-rover-captures-shining-clouds-on-mars
It's pretty crazy to think of the temperatures of the different solar system bodies. Venus has temperatures hot enough to cause molten metal rain, while Saturn's moon Titan has liquid methane oceans and Pluto has snow of frozen Nitrogen. Then you have the insane pressure and temperatures found in the core of Jupiter that causes hydrogen to exhibit some properties of a metal (metallic hydrogen).