A popular new video shows the soft but strange scene as clouds float above the surface of Mars.
The images were taken from cameras mounted on the Curiosity Rover, which explore the surface of the red planet.
Although the newly arrived Perseverance rover has been at the center of focus on Mars over the past few weeks, it is one of the many rovers on the surface. Others like Curiosity are trying to understand more and more about the planet.
The eight new images, taken by the navigation camera aboard the robot explorer, show about five minutes of time on the surface. As such, the clouds can be seen moving in a way that is remarkably similar to the clouds on earth.
They were shot last week and shared by Paul Byrne, a scientist at North Carolina State University.
While the clouds look like ours, the very different atmosphere on the red planet – which is very thin, among other things – means that they have to form in different ways.
To form clouds, water molecules must condense around particles. On Earth, it may be dust grains that are carried up by winds, but Mars does not have a thick enough atmosphere to form it so easily.
It is suspected that on Mars it is at least in part the result of dust formed when space debris hits the Martian atmosphere. It creates the particles around which the clouds can form and is then seen as it moves across the surface.
The thin atmosphere is also the reason why the clouds on Mars are similar to cirrus clouds on earth – white and light, rather than thick and puffy.
The clouds on Mars can also be “noctilucent” – illuminated by the sun, even at night, because they are so high above the Martian surface.
This is not the only weather on Mars that looks like on Earth, but in fact strikingly different. In 2008, the Phoenix lander found snow falling on the surface.
But even though the snow in the picture looks like our own, it is made up of carbon dioxide, like dry ice.