NASA scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have found that the local atmosphere in Mars is clear in winter, dustier in spring and summer, and windy in autumn. According to the scientists, NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover that has now completed its second Martian year since landing inside Gale Crater nearly four years ago has recorded the environmental patterns through two full cycles of Martian seasons. The second cycle has helped the scientists distinguish seasonal effects from sporadic events. For instance, a large spike in methane in the local atmosphere during the first southern-hemisphere autumn in Gale Crater was not repeated the second autumn, they added to the report.
Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said, curiosity’s weather station has made measurements nearly every hour of every day, more than 34 million so far. The duration is important, because it is the second time through the seasons that lets us see repeated patterns. According to the scientists concerned, It was an episodic release, still unexplained. However, the Rover’s measurements do suggest that much subtler changes in the background methane concentration, amounts much less than during the spike, may follow a seasonal pattern. Measurements of the temperature, pressure and ultraviolet light reaching the surface and the scant water vapour in the air at Gale Crater show strong, repeated seasonal changes.
The temperature recorded has quite a vast difference in summer and winter time. NASA’s Curiosity’s Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) has measured air temperatures from 15.9 degrees Celsius on a summer afternoon to minus 100 degrees Celsius on a winter night. German Martinez from University of Michigan said, Mars is much drier than our planet, and in particular Gale Crater, near the equator, is a very dry place on Mars. The water vapour content is a thousand to 10 thousand times less than on Earth.
