NASA astronomers have just shared a colorful new view of March proving that the Red Planet also looks blue.
Using a special infrared camera aboard the Mars Odyssey orbit, which has been rising across the Red Planet since 2001, researchers have captured a thermal image of the Mars North Pole, digitally colored to highlight the wide temperature there. Areas tinted in blue represent colder regions, while warmer areas are tinted in yellow and orange, according to a NASA Declaration.
In this image – which is an area about 30 kilometers wide – expansive sand dunes lie in golden drifts, warm on one side of the sun and cool in the dark on the other.
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The complex scene covers only a small fraction of the entire North North Pole, which covers an area as large as Texas, the researchers said. N son Earth, the Mars poles are the coldest places on their planet, with temperatures dropping to minus 220 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 140 degrees Celsius) in winter, according to the National Weather Service.
Both of Mars’ poles are covered with permanent shells made of water ice, although carbon dioxide ice (better known as dry ice) contributes to the cold nature in winter. Cracks in the dry ice cover are responsible for the whimsical patterns known as the “Spiders on Mars”). Scientists believe that several lakes of liquid water do hiding under the Mars South Pole, too.
The colorful picture above is a compilation of several shots that the Odyssey track took between December 2002 and November 2004. NASA shared this on April 8 to celebrate the orbit’s 20th anniversary in space (the orbit was launched on April 7, 2001). At that time, the floating observatory, according to NASA, sent back more than 1 million thermal images from Mars to Earth.
In addition to the possible location of water ice stored on the planet, Odyssey’s eye in the sky also has a blessing for its robot brothers from below; data from Odyssey helped NASA scientists choose the ideal location for the implementation of the Perseverance in February 2012.
Originally published on Live Science.