Mars, god of war, banner of passion, sexuality and masculine virility, is the name of the second smallest planet in the solar system, after Mercury. The planet’s two moons, Phobos (Greek: “Fear”) and Deimos (“Terror”), were named after two of the children of Ares and Aphrodite (the counterparts of Mars and Venus, respectively, in Greek mythology). .
With NASA’s Perseverance rover taking its first steps across the red planet and the small Ingenuity helicopter also making history, Mars has become the target of all eyes and, therefore, in a fairly crowded world lately. As the rover acclimatizes to the Martian surface, rovers like Curiosity, its predecessor, continue to explore the base of Mount Sharp (Aeolis Mons), a several-kilometer-high mountain in the center of Gale Crater.
There, using the ChemCam instrument’s telescope to make detailed observations of the rugged terrain of Mount Sharp from a distance, a French-American team led by William Rapin has discovered that the Martian climate recorded there alternated between dry and wetter periods, before drying up. completely about 3 billion years ago.
The climate of Mars likely experienced several large-scale fluctuations between dry conditions and river and lake environments, until the generally arid conditions observed today were fully entrenched. These are some of the details that we are elucidating about some missions that, like Curiosity’s, are in charge of characterizing in more detail how the ancient Martian climate evolved.
Mars is usually a fairly easy planet to observe in the night sky because its orbit is outside of Earth. It is also the only planet whose solid surface and atmospheric phenomena can be seen in telescopes from our planet and, thanks to research carried out since the 1960s, we have discovered that Mars is similar to Earth in many respects, as it possesses clouds, winds and a day of approximately 24 hours (24 hours 39 minutes, exactly; about 3% longer than the solar day on Earth).
