IcyPatriot

Here's a way cool picture to give the forum a healthcare break.

Mars: Ice walls that show another side of the Red Planet | Mail Online

Real World

Great pictures, but they are doctored photos with a 3x vertical scale. Still nice though.

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"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
Leo Tolstoy, 1897

alvinnf

Hot on one side cold on the other. I am not a big science buff. Is there something about that planet's orbit that is strange. You would think it would experience some phases of heating and cooling if it could suppport ice. Does it have a moon or moons?

IcyPatriot

That thing is like the size of Rhode Island.

Wolfpack

I believe Mars has 2 moons which are really little more than glorified asteroids. They don't even contain enough mass to collapse upon themselves into a sphereoidal shape.

alvinnf

I thought Mars was a really hot planet. Is there something about the planets rotation that keeps one side from being exposed to the sun. Shocked at the ice.

Wolfpack

No, Mars has nights and days like Earth does. And it isn't hot. It is generally colder than Earth, but it does have an atmosphere and can get warm in the summer (by "warm" I mean, like, into the 50's or something like that).

alvinnf

Thanks for the info. Thanks to Icy for the post. It something you just don't think about in your day to day.

PatsFanInVa

Phobos and deimos, if I remember correctly (the moons, Greek for "fear and panic," again, going by memory - the dogs of war that Mars/Ares, God of War, used to unleash ahead of him)

It does happen that a planet gets locked w/one face permanently to the sun, such is the case w/our moon. Mars is cold strictly because its orbit is so far out. Venus is the hot one, thanks to a runaway greenhouse effect.