GabyAlthough Mars – it is a cold, dead planet, yet it is incredibly beautiful. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has shown images of amazing natural phenomena that we will never see on Earth. They are magical and somewhat eerie.
Martian Photo Chronicles
The HiRISE camera, installed on board the reconnaissance orbital spacecraft NASA I photographed carbon dioxide geysers on Mars.
The Red Planet has a thin, sparse atmosphere, with the majority of it (95 percent) being carbon dioxide (CO2). When winter arrives on Mars, CO2 freezes in the planet’s polar regions and forms a thick, translucent layer on the surface. It remains in a dormant state for months. As spring approaches, the temperature gradually rises.
Sunlight passes through a frozen layer of carbon dioxide, warming the ground beneath it. As it heats up, it sublimates the frozen gas into vapor, which accumulates beneath the solid layer of CO2. Eventually, the gas breaks through weak spots in the ice, usually in the form of geysers that spray murky material onto the frozen surface. surface .
Sometimes eruptions occurring at a speed of 160 km/h cause the formation of dark areas resembling spiders.
Researchers refer to the polar regions with these patterns as arachnid or spider terrain. It has a wrinkled appearance, writes Science Alert NASA scientists recreated spider terrain drawings in laboratory conditions to understand the phenomena underlying its formation.
“Spiders are strange and beautiful geological formations in their own right,” said Lauren McKeon from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The process that explains the formation of these natural wonders is called the Keiffer model.
Hugh Kieffer is one of the leading scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey who published a paper in the journal Nature in 2006 explaining this mechanism. The paper was titled “CO2 Jets Formed by Sublimation Under a Translucent Layer of Ice in the Seasonal Southern Polar Cap of Mars.”
The authors of the study wrote: “We hypothesize that the seasonal ice cap forms an impermeable, translucent layer of ice with CO2 sublimating from the base, accumulating high-pressure gas beneath the layer. This gas lifts the ice, which eventually cracks, creating high-speed CO2 jets.”
Perhaps the inhabitants of our planet are somewhat biased when they believe that nothing is more beautiful than Earth. However, the natural wonders of Mars are unmatched by anything on Earth, especially when it comes to the CO2 geysers and the patterns they create.
