If Olaf, the sweet and sensitive snowman from Disney’s Frozen, had ancestors on other planets, could this be his dusty relative?
On July 13, day 1208 on Mars, the Perseverance rover will begin its descent. Mastcam-Z Right Camera I spotted an area with many rock formations while His daily investigations From the surface of the red planet. And I have delivered with all sincerity. Image to Earth. If you look closely, as we did here at Space.com, you might notice that in the lower left corner of the image, there is a pile of rocks that looks like a little snowman!
This little guy may have a drier, dustier build, unlike Olaf’s soft, fluffy, white build, but if you use your imagination, he could almost present himself as a very important question to Perseverance: “Do you want to build a snowman?”
Perseverance rover still inside Jezero CraterIt landed again on February 18, 2021, but has now begun its journey to climb back into the crater and move to a new location.
Related: Perseverance rover on Mars explores an interesting rock formation called “Bright Angel” (photo)
Theoretically, is it possible for a real snowman to exist on Mars? The simple answer is “probably not.” But there’s also a long answer.
Mars may have a thin atmosphere, but it can still cause Dynamic climate and extreme weather events — From dust storms to snow Technically speaking. However, it wasn’t always this way for the Red Planet. Reports from NASA’s MAVEN mission have concluded that Mars was once thick enough atmosphere Water may remain on the surface for long periods of time.
According to NASA scientists, there is still water on the planet — but with its currently thin atmosphere, that water would only be able to remain liquid for a limited amount of time. So water on Mars could be found beneath the surface of the polar regions, just as water ice or seasonal brine that meanders down hills and crater walls. You could probably make a “snowman” out of these materials with enough tinkering, but I can’t imagine it would look anything like a classic snowman on Earth.
Still, it doesn’t hurt to take a moment to enjoy what we can see in the new image taken by NASA’s rover. Associating emotional shapes with rocks on Mars is like lying in the grass and identifying animals in the clouds above us.
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