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Planet Mars, explained

The rusty world is full of mysteries—and some of the solar
system's most extreme geology. Learn more about Earth's
smaller, colder neighbor.
7 MINUTE READ

BY MICHAEL GRESHKO

T H E R E D P L A N E T  Mars,named for the Roman god of war, has long

been an omen in the night sky. And in its own way, the planet’s rusty
red surface tells a story of destruction. Billions of years ago, the fourth
planet from the sun could have been mistaken for Earth’s smaller twin,
with liquid water on its surface—and maybe even life.

Now, the world is a cold, barren desert with few signs of liquid water.
But after decades of study using orbiters, landers, and rovers, scientists
have revealed Mars as a dynamic, windblown landscape that could—just
maybe—harbor microbial life beneath its rusty surface even today.

Longer year and shifting seasons

With a radius of 2,106 miles, Mars is the seventh largest planet in our
solar system and about half the diameter of Earth. Its surface gravity is
37.5 percent of Earth’s.

 
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MARS 101
Recent NASA exploratory expeditions revealed some of the red planet's biggest
mysteries. This video explains what makes it so different from Earth and what
would happen if humans lived there.

Mars rotates on its axis every 24.6 Earth hours, defining the length of a
Martian day, which is called a sol (short for “solar day”). Mars’s axis of
rotation is tilted 25.2 degrees relative to the plane of the planet’s orbit
around the sun, which helps give Mars seasons similar to those on
Earth. Whichever hemisphere is tilted closer to the sun experiences
spring and summer, while the hemisphere tilted away gets fall and
winter. At two specific moments each year—called the equinoxes—both
hemispheres receive equal illumination.

But for several reasons, seasons on Mars are different from those on
Earth. For one, Mars is on average about 50 percent farther from the
sun than Earth is, with an average orbital distance of 142 million miles.
This means that it takes Mars longer to complete a single orbit,
stretching out its year and the lengths of its seasons. On Mars, a year
lasts 669.6 sols, or 687 Earth days, and an individual season can last up
to 194 sols, or just over 199 Earth days.

The angle of Mars’s axis of rotation also changes much more often than
Earth's, which has led to swings in the Martian climate on timescales of
thousands to millions of years. In addition, Mars’s orbit is less circular
than Earth’s, which means that its orbital velocity varies more over the
course of a Martian year. This annual variation affects the timing of the
red planet’s solstices and equinoxes. On Mars, the northern
hemisphere’s spring and summer are longer than the fall and winter.

There’s another complicating factor: Mars has a far thinner atmosphere

than Earth, which dramatically lessens how much heat the planet can
trap near its surface. Surface temperatures on Mars can reach as high as
70 degrees Fahrenheit and as low as -225 degrees Fahrenheit, but on
average, its surface is -81 degrees Fahrenheit, a full 138 degrees colder
than Earth’s average temperature.

Windy and watery, once

The primary driver of modern Martian geology is its atmosphere, which
is mostly made of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon. By Earth
standards, the air is preposterously thin; air pressure atop Mount
Everest is about 50 times higher than it is at the Martian surface.
Despite the thin air, Martian breezes can gust up to 60 miles an hour,
kicking up dust that fuels huge dust storms and massive fields of alien
sand dunes.

Once upon a time, though, wind and  water flowed across the red planet.
Robotic rovers have found clear evidence that billions of years ago,
lakes and rivers of liquid water coursed across the red planet’s surface.
This means that at some point in the distant past, Mars’s atmosphere
was sufficiently dense and retained enough heat for water to remain
liquid on the red planet’s surface. Not so today: Though water ice
abounds under the Martian surface and in its polar ice caps, there are
no large bodies of liquid water on the surface there today.
Mars also lacks an active plate tectonic system, the geologic engine that
drives our active Earth, and is also missing a planetary magnetic field.
The absence of this protective barrier makes it easier for the sun’s high-
energy particles to strip away the red planet’s atmosphere, which may
help explain why Mars’s atmosphere is now so thin. But in the ancient
past—up until about 4.12 to 4.14 billion years ago—Mars seems to have
had an inner dynamo powering a planet-wide magnetic field. What shut
down the Martian dynamo? Scientists are still trying to figure out.

High highs and low lows

Like Earth and Venus, Mars has mountains, valleys, and volcanoes, but
the red planet’s are by far the biggest and most dramatic. Olympus
Mons, the solar system’s largest volcano, towers some 16 miles above
the Martian surface, making it three times taller than Everest. But the
base of Olympus Mons is so wide—some 374 miles across—that the
volcano’s average slope is only slightly steeper than a wheelchair ramp.
The peak is so massive, it curves with the surface of Mars. If you stood
at the outer edge of Olympus Mons, its summit would lie beyond the
horizon.

Mars has not only the highest highs, but also some of the solar system’s
lowest lows. Southeast of Olympus Mons lies Valles Marineris, the red
planet’s iconic canyon system. The gorges span about 2,500 miles and
cut up to 4.3 miles into the red planet’s surface. The network of chasms
is four times deeper—and five times longer—than Earth’s Grand
Canyon, and at its widest, it’s a staggering 200 miles across. The valleys
get their name from Mariner 9, which became the first spacecraft to
orbit another planet when it arrived at Mars in 1971.

A tale of two hemispheres

About 4.5 billion years ago, Mars coalesced from the gaseous, dusty disk
that surrounded our young sun. Over time, the red planet’s innards
differentiated into a core, a mantle, and an outer crust that’s an average
of 40 miles thick.
Its core is likely made of iron and nickel, like Earth’s, but probably
contains more sulfur than ours. The best available estimates suggest
that the core is about 2,120 miles across, give or take 370 miles—but we
don’t know the specifics. NASA’s InSight lander aims to unravel the
mysteries of Mars’s interior by tracking how seismic waves move
through the red planet.

Mars’s northern and southern hemispheres are wildly different from

one another, to a degree unlike any other planet in the solar system.
The planet’s northern hemisphere consists mostly of low-lying plains,
and the crust there can be just 19 miles thick. The highlands of the
southern hemisphere, however, are studded with many extinct
volcanoes, and the crust there can get up to 62 miles thick.

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What happened? It’s possible that patterns of internal magma flow

caused the difference, but some scientists think it's the result of Mars
suffering one or several major impacts. One recent model suggests Mars
got its two faces because an object the size of Earth’s moon slammed
into Mars near its south pole.

Both hemispheres do have one thing in common: They’re covered in the

planet’s trademark dust, which gets its many shades of orange, red, and
brown from iron rust.

Cosmic companions
At some point in the distant past, the red planet gained its two small
and irregularly shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos. The two lumpy
worlds, discovered in 1877, are named for the sons and chariot drivers
of the god Mars in Roman mythology. How the moons formed remains
unsolved. One possibility is that they formed in the asteroid belt and
were captured by Mars’s gravity. But recent models instead suggest that
they could have formed from the debris flung up from Mars after a huge
impact long ago.

Deimos, the smaller of the two moons, orbits Mars every 30 hours and
is less than 10 miles across. Its larger sibling Phobos bears many scars,
including craters and deep grooves running across its surface. Scientists
have long debated what caused the grooves on Phobos. Are they tracks
left behind by boulders rolling across the surface after an ancient
impact, or signs that Mars’s gravity is pulling the moon apart?

Either way, the moon’s future will be considerably less groovy. Each
century, Phobos gets about six feet closer to Mars; in 50 million years or
so, the moon is projected either to crash into the red planet’s surface or
break into smithereens.