Planning a trip to Mars? Better carry all your blankets along! Because the Red Planet is a much colder place than the Earth.
Near the equator, summer afternoons can be a pleasant 20 degrees Celsius. But don’t let that fool you. At night you may get a freezing minus 73 degrees Celsius! For comparison, the freezers we have at home, even the very best ones, can only go up to minus 23 degrees Celsius. Winters are worse, with temperatures at the poles dropping down to minus 125 degrees Celsius. In fact, the average temperature on Mars is around minus 60 degrees Celsius compared to our planet’s 15!
There are more than a few reasons for this Martian ‘coldness.’ One, the average distance between the Sun and Mars is almost 50 per cent more than that between the Sun and the Earth. So the amount of sunlight reaching the Red Planet is lesser, only about 43 per cent of what we get here. Two, Mars has a more elliptical orbit when compared to the Earth, which periodically takes it closer to, and farther from the Sun. During this second phase, Mars’ axial tilt keeps its south pole further away from the Sun, making southern winters quite extreme. Three, the Martian atmosphere is very thin, only one-hundredth as dense as the Earth’s. So it cannot store heat and act like a “thermal blanket” for Mars.
Picture Credit : Google
