Planet Mars, explained

The rusty world is full of mysteries—and some of the solar system's

most extreme geology. Learn more about Earth's smaller, colder
neighbor.

BY MICHAEL GRESHKO

THE RED PLANET Mars, named for the Roman god of war, has
long been an omen in the night sky. And in its own way, the
planet’s rusty red surface tells a story of destruction. Billions of
years ago, the fourth planet from the sun could have been
mistaken for Earth’s smaller twin, with liquid water on its
surface—and maybe even life.

Now, the world is a cold, barren desert with few signs of liquid
water. But after decades of study using orbiters, landers, and
rovers, scientists have revealed Mars as a dynamic, windblown
landscape that could—just maybe—harbor microbial life beneath
its rusty surface even today.

Longer year and shifting seasons

With a radius of 2,106 miles, Mars is the seventh largest planet in
our solar system and about half the diameter of Earth. Its surface
gravity is 37.5 percent of Earth’s.

Mars rotates on its axis every 24.6 Earth hours, defining the
length of a Martian day, which is called a sol (short for “solar
day”). Mars’s axis of rotation is tilted 25.2 degrees relative to the
plane of the planet’s orbit around the sun, which helps give Mars
seasons similar to those on Earth. Whichever hemisphere is tilted
closer to the sun experiences spring and summer, while the
hemisphere tilted away gets fall and winter. At two specific
moments each year—called the equinoxes—both hemispheres
receive equal illumination.

But for several reasons, seasons on Mars are different from those
on Earth. For one, Mars is on average about 50 percent farther
from the sun than Earth is, with an average orbital distance of
142 million miles. This means that it takes Mars longer to
complete a single orbit, stretching out its year and the lengths of
its seasons. On Mars, a year lasts 669.6 sols, or 687 Earth days,
and an individual season can last up to 194 sols, or just over 199
Earth days.

The angle of Mars’s axis of rotation also changes much more

often than Earth's, which has led to swings in the Martian
climate on timescales of thousands to millions of years. In
addition, Mars’s orbit is less circular than Earth’s, which means
that its orbital velocity varies more over the course of a Martian
year. This annual variation affects the timing of the red planet’s
solstices and equinoxes. On Mars, the northern hemisphere’s
spring and summer are longer than the fall and winter.

There’s another complicating factor: Mars has a far thinner

atmosphere than Earth, which dramatically lessens how much
heat the planet can trap near its surface. Surface temperatures on
Mars can reach as high as 70 degrees Fahrenheit and as low as -
225 degrees Fahrenheit, but on average, its surface is -81 degrees
Fahrenheit, a full 138 degrees colder than Earth’s average
temperature.

Windy and watery, once

The primary driver of modern Martian geology is its atmosphere,
which is mostly made of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon. By
Earth standards, the air is preposterously thin; air pressure atop
Mount Everest is about 50 times higher than it is at the Martian
surface. Despite the thin air, Martian breezes can gust up to 60
miles an hour, kicking up dust that fuels huge dust storms and
massive fields of alien sand dunes.

Once upon a time, though, wind and water flowed across the red
planet. Robotic rovers have found clear evidence that billions of
years ago, lakes and rivers of liquid water coursed across the red
planet’s surface. This means that at some point in the distant
past, Mars’s atmosphere was sufficiently dense and retained
enough heat for water to remain liquid on the red planet’s
surface. Not so today: Though water ice abounds under the
Martian surface and in its polar ice caps, there are no large
bodies of liquid water on the surface there today.

Mars also lacks an active plate tectonic system, the geologic

engine that drives our active Earth, and is also missing a
planetary magnetic field. The absence of this protective barrier
makes it easier for the sun’s high-energy particles to strip away
the red planet’s atmosphere, which may help explain why Mars’s
atmosphere is now so thin. But in the ancient past—up
until about 4.12 to 4.14 billion years ago—Mars seems to have
had an inner dynamo powering a planet-wide magnetic field.
What shut down the Martian dynamo? Scientists are still trying
to figure out.

High highs and low lows

Like Earth and Venus, Mars has mountains, valleys, and
volcanoes, but the red planet’s are by far the biggest and most
dramatic. Olympus Mons, the solar system’s largest volcano,
towers some 16 miles above the Martian surface, making it three
times taller than Everest. But the base of Olympus Mons is so
wide—some 374 miles across—that the volcano’s average slope is
only slightly steeper than a wheelchair ramp. The peak is so
massive, it curves with the surface of Mars. If you stood at the
outer edge of Olympus Mons, its summit would lie beyond the
horizon.

Mars has not only the highest highs, but also some of the solar
system’s lowest lows. Southeast of Olympus Mons lies Valles
Marineris, the red planet’s iconic canyon system. The gorges
span about 2,500 miles and cut up to 4.3 miles into the red
planet’s surface. The network of chasms is four times deeper—
and five times longer—than Earth’s Grand Canyon, and at its
widest, it’s a staggering 200 miles across. The valleys get their
name from Mariner 9, which became the first spacecraft to orbit
another planet when it arrived at Mars in 1971.

A tale of two hemispheres

About 4.5 billion years ago, Mars coalesced from the gaseous,
dusty disk that surrounded our young sun. Over time, the red
planet’s innards differentiated into a core, a mantle, and an outer
crust that’s an average of 40 miles thick.

Its core is likely made of iron and nickel, like Earth’s, but
probably contains more sulfur than ours. The best available
estimates suggest that the core is about 2,120 miles across, give
or take 370 miles—but we don’t know the specifics. NASA’s
InSight lander aims to unravel the mysteries of Mars’s interior by
tracking how seismic waves move through the red planet.

Mars’s northern and southern hemispheres are wildly different

from one another, to a degree unlike any other planet in the solar
system. The planet’s northern hemisphere consists mostly of low-
lying plains, and the crust there can be just 19 miles thick. The
highlands of the southern hemisphere, however, are studded
with many extinct volcanoes, and the crust there can get up to 62
miles thick.

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What happened? It’s possible that patterns of internal magma

flow caused the difference, but some scientists think it's the
result of Mars suffering one or several major impacts. One recent
model suggests Mars got its two faces because an object the size
of Earth’s moon slammed into Mars near its south pole.

Both hemispheres do have one thing in common: They’re covered

in the planet’s trademark dust, which gets its many shades of
orange, red, and brown from iron rust.
Cosmic companions
At some point in the distant past, the red planet gained its two
small and irregularly shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos. The
two lumpy worlds, discovered in 1877, are named for the sons
and chariot drivers of the god Mars in Roman mythology. How
the moons formed remains unsolved. One possibility is that they
formed in the asteroid belt and were captured by Mars’s gravity.
But recent models instead suggest that they could have formed
from the debris flung up from Mars after a huge impact long ago.

Deimos, the smaller of the two moons, orbits Mars every 30

hours and is less than 10 miles across. Its larger sibling Phobos
bears many scars, including craters and deep grooves running
across its surface. Scientists have long debated what caused the
grooves on Phobos. Are they tracks left behind by
boulders rolling across the surface after an ancient impact, or
signs that Mars’s gravity is pulling the moon apart?

Either way, the moon’s future will be considerably less groovy.

Each century, Phobos gets about six feet closer to Mars; in 50
million years or so, the moon is projected either to crash into the
red planet’s surface or break into smithereens.

Missions to Mars
Since the 1960s, humans have robotically explored Mars more
than any other planet beyond Earth. Currently, eight missions
from the U.S., European Union, Russia, and India are actively
orbiting Mars or roving across its surface. But getting safely to
the red planet is no small feat. Of the 45 Mars missions launched
since 1960, 26 have had some component fail to leave Earth, fall
silent en route, miss orbit around Mars, burn up in the
atmosphere, crash on the surface, or die prematurely.

More missions are on the horizon, including some designed to

help search for Martian life. NASA is building its Mars 2020
rover to cache promising samples of Martian rock that a future
mission would return to Earth. In 2020, the European Space
Agency and Roscosmos plan to launch a rover named for chemist
Rosalind Franklin, whose work was crucial to deciphering the
structure of DNA. The rover will drill into Martian soil to hunt
for signs of past and present life. Other countries are joining the
fray, making space exploration more global in the process. In
July 2020, the United Arab Emirates is slated to launch its Hope
orbiter, which will study the Martian atmosphere.

Perhaps humans will one day join robots on the red planet. NASA
has stated its goal to send humans back to the moon as a
stepping-stone to Mars. Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX,
is building a massive vehicle called Starship in part to send
humans to Mars. Will humans eventually build a scientific base
on the Martian surface, like those that dot Antarctica? How will
human activity affect the red planet or our searches for life there?

Time will tell. But no matter what, Mars will continue to occupy
the human imagination, a glimmering red beacon in our skies
and stories.

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