A snowy morning on Mars

It's almost Halloween, and in Colorado that means we should have seen our first snowfall. As a child, trick or treating in blizzards was a common experience (I dressed up as Edmund Hillary or Ernest Shackleton those years). But this year, not so much as a frost on the ground.

So instead, here's a remarkable video of clouds and snow falling on Mars, taken by NASA's Phoenix Lander one Martian morning in 2009.



Watching the clouds move in such an earthly way across the martian sky is neat enough, but every few moments you can glimpse a few falling white specks.

Scientists have evidence that the snow and clouds are similar to snow and clouds on Earth; i.e. based on water-ice (rather than say, carbon dioxide). Universe Today did a nice write up on the scientific findings of the Phoenix team.

The video gives me chills! Not for the temps, but for the fact that we've sent a little bit of earth up to another planet, just to find out that it's not as different from our home planet as we thought.