Kind: captions
Language: en
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you're watching a Nova Video
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podcast so both planets have major
similarities the sun is the the source
of energy in both cases the sun is
driving the circulation of the air and
it's driving it in the same kinds of
ways we have a hot equator in in both
cases and the colder polar region both
planets also have icy polar
caps and they both rotates with a a
period of around 24 hours the day on
Mars is 24 hours and around 40 minutes
and the other thing that's very similar
and quite bizarrely similar is that both
planets they they're they're tilted with
respect to their orbit around the Sun
and that's what gives both of those
planets
Seasons so both planets have those major
similarities and that's kind of where
the similarities stop I guess the big
differences are Mars is a little further
away from the
Sun so we'd expect temperatures to be
cooler at the equator temperatures in
the morning might be- 50 say and then at
2: p.m. you'd be up to Zer or +
10 so that huge change is very different
from
Earth so while the earth atmosphere is
around 80% nitrogen and 16% oxygen the
Mars atmosphere is 95% carbon
dioxide with its atmosphere of carbon
dioxide and its low temperatures each
winter about 30% of the whole atmosphere
freezes out onto the polar
caps so on top of the the water ice
there's a layer of carbon dioxide ice as
well the amount of water is very
tiny if all the water in the skies above
froze down onto the surface we're
looking at a layer of water on the
surface of Mars it's thinner than a
human hair you know it's it's a tiny
tiny amount of
water Mars is a dry icy planet and its
atmosphere is is much thinner than the
earth it's about 1% of the pressure of
the Earth's
atmosphere and what this actually means
is the pressure is so low that water
isn't actually stable in its liquid
form so if you have a glass of water on
Mars it would instantly
evaporate and and that's just a function
of the surface pressure
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there the Phoenix Mission produced uh
weather reports for the first 90 days
that were fairly
constant uh it really would have been a
fun time to be there you know feel like
clear sunny
weather and then at the end of that time
that's when we started to see quite
interesting cloud formations we could
see that they were moving by at altitude
at some speed and you can see them
forming and evaporating as well and we
started to see these dust devils a dust
devil is a mini tornado a little
Whirlwind that is lifting dust off the
surface and we did start to see Frost
and we saw this quite beautifully as
well for the very first time we saw
evidence that crystals of water rice
were actually falling out of the clouds
and and that was the basis of our
discovery of of snow on
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Mars in the future as long as we all had
space suits
on I I think there would be a lot of fun
things to do there's lots to explore I'm
sure it's very pretty as well so for
people who who like exploring the
unknown and it would be a fabulous place
to go to
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oh