Mars

All About Mars

By Madison Nef

It’s easy to forget that Earth is not the only planet in the solar system. Seven (or eight if you include Pluto) other planets whiz around the sun just like ours. Of those planets, none of them are closer or more engaging to the imagination than Mars. Often called the Red Planet, Mars is named this due to the high levels of iron oxide that lay on the surface of the planet in mineral form. This causes the planet to give off a reddish tint.

Besides this, however… Mars is quite similar to Earth. It’s the fourth closest planet to the sun (Earth is the third) and while they’re similar in size and terrain- the planet is (as mentioned above) completely red, as opposed to Earth’s green land formations, mountains, and deep blue oceans. However… once you get past the minor difference in coloring, the planets are still quite similar.

Here are a few of the similarities, listed out:

Polar Ice Caps
Mars has both North and South polar ice caps, much like Earth. Also like Earth, both ice caps are made mostly of frozen water. Since so much water is frozen in the ice caps of Mars, some scientists think that life could have once existed there. As long as there was water… existence would have been possible. 

Length of a Year
Mars isn’t too much farther from the Sun than Earth is... As a result, a typical year on Mars is the equivalent of roughly two years for us; the exact time period being a year and 320 days. 

Length of a Day
While a year on Mars might be almost twice as long as a year on Earth, the length of a day there is almost identical. A Martian day is 24 hours and 39 minutes long, less than an hour longer than a day on Earth. 

Seasons
Mars has seasons like Earth too. These seasons are much longer than Earth seasons because Mars is so much farther from the sun… so much so that the average high for a summer day on Mars is 23 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mars and Earth seem so similar at this point that you’re probably shocked life hasn’t been found there yet, right? Wrong. Not everything is so similar… in fact, there are a great many differences too. If there weren’t… Mars wouldn’t be so interesting.

A good example is Mars’ size. Many planets are far bigger than Earth- for example, 318 Earths could easily fit inside Jupiter. Mars is nowhere near as big- in fact; it’s one of the only two planets in the solar system that seems to be significantly smaller than Earth. To put the sizing into perspective- if you put the planets side by side, Earth would be a basketball and Mars would be a softball.

However, just because Mars is small doesn’t mean it isn’t fascinating… OR that there aren’t landmarks to be found on Mars. The Olympus Mons on Mars is the largest mountain in the entire solar system at an astonishing height of over 25 kilometers high. To put this into perspective for those who haven’t memorized metric units… that’s more than 3 times higher than Mount Everest. It’s so big that astronomers in the 19^th century could see it through basic telescopes.

Then, there’s Valles Marineris, which is the largest known canyon in the solar system. It stretches 4,000 kilometers across the planet’s surface and if you look at photos of Mars taken from telescopes, you can see the gigantic indent/gash that is Valles Marineris.

Finally, last but not least, the Borealis Basin makes up over 40% of the planet’s entire surface… in fact, it takes up almost the whole entire northern hemisphere. Not only does the basin take up this much space, but the entire planet in and of itself  is covered in craters caused by asteroids and meteorites hitting it throughout the years.

As of today, 43,000 of these craters have been found… and that only includes the extremely large ones. Mars only has two moons- Phobos and Deimos.

I’d love to continue, but I have to write a report on Saturn now… I’ll leave this report here.

Maddie