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While Mars's climate has similarities to Earth's, including periodic ice ages, there are also important differences, such as much lower thermal inertia. Mars' atmosphere has a scale height of approximately 11 km (36,000 ft), 60% greater than that on Earth. The climate is of considerable relevance to the question of whether life is or ever has ...
Mars climate simulation models date as far back as the Viking missions to Mars. Most Mars climate simulation models were written by individual researchers that were never reused or open-sourced. By the 1990s the need for a unified model codebase came into being, due to the general impact of the internet on climate modelling and research. This ...
The "Water Strategy" was "to explore and study Mars in three areas: - Evidence of past or present life, - Climate (weather, processes, and history), - Resources (environment and utilization)." All three areas were seen as intimately connected to water.
Changes in Mars's orbit and tilt cause significant changes in the distribution of water ice from polar regions down to latitudes equivalent to Texas. During certain climate periods water vapor leaves polar ice and enters the atmosphere. The water returns to the ground at lower latitudes as deposits of frost or snow mixed generously with dust.
These ice layers hold easily accessible clues about Mars' climate history and make frozen water accessible to future robotic or human explorers. [264] Some researchers suggested these deposits could be the remnants of glaciers that existed millions of years ago when the planet's spin axis and orbit were different. (See section Mars' Ice ages ...
1995 photo of Mars showing approximate size of the polar caps. The planet Mars has two permanent polar ice caps of water ice and some dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide, CO 2).Above kilometer-thick layers of water ice permafrost, slabs of dry ice are deposited during a pole's winter, [1] [2] lying in continuous darkness, causing 25–30% of the atmosphere being deposited annually at either of the ...
After sulfates cemented the sediments, hematite concretions grew by precipitation from groundwater. Some sulfates formed into large crystals which later dissolved to leave vugs. Several lines of evidence point toward an arid climate in the past billion years or so, but a climate supporting water, at least for a time, in the distant past. [98]
Geology of Mars – Scientific study of the surface, crust, and interior of the planet Mars; Groundwater on Mars – Water held in permeable ground; Impact crater – Circular depression in a solid astronomical body formed by the impact of a smaller object; Lakes on Mars – Former Bodies of Water on Mars; Scientific information from the Mars ...