Although it’s found on another planet altogether, there’s a permanent "winter wonderland" on Mars that would never suffer a green Christmas — or a red one, as the case may be. The European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter used its High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) to take pictures of the 82 kilometer (51 mile)-wide Korolev crater near Mars’ north pole, home to a massive mound made of water ice that persists year-round due to the crater’s peculiar topography.

Korolev crater’s ice sheet is 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) deep, and with a volume of 2,200 cubic kilometers (530 cubic miles), the ice pack holds a similar amount of water in ice form as Canada’s Great Bear Lake, or five times that of Lake Erie. read more

New computer models of Mars’ atmosphere are indicating that the Red Planet may experience rapidly-falling snowstorms at night, possibly sprinkling the surface below with a light layer of snow. It was previously assumed that snow that fell on Mars did so slowly, taking hours to drop a single mile, and typically evaporating before it reached the surface. But the new simulations show that ice crystals forming at night may only take about five to ten minutes to fall the same distance, explaining why NASA’s Phoenix lander observed a dusting of snow shortly after touchdown in 2008.
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