Minnesota’s largest city was briefly colder than Mars last month.
A late-November cold snap in Minneapolis sent temperatures tumbling 10 degrees below the historical average, AccuWeather meteorologist Brian Lada explained.
High temperatures were in the mid-to-upper 20s, marking the coldest stretch for the city’s nearly 430,000 residents since February.
But on the Red Planet, some 225 million miles away, NASA’s Curiosity rover measured daytime highs of around 30 degrees Fahrenheit.
However, conditions changed dramatically after sunset.
While the evening temperatures fell into the teens and 20s in Minneapolis, low temperatures on Mars were recorded near 100 degrees below zero.
It was “a reminder that even if the afternoon readings appear similar, the Red Planet is still an entirely different world,” said Lada.
How is Mars so cold?
Well, it is in space. It’s also farther from the sun than Earth and has a thin atmosphere that is unable to keep heat effectively, according to NASA.
While the Earth is in orbit around 93 million miles away from the sun, Mars is located some 142 million miles away.
Earth’s atmosphere is thin, but it’s still thicker than that of the Martian atmosphere, as well. The atmosphere on Mars is about one percent of the density of Earth’s atmosphere at the surface, the agency’s Earth Observatory says.
That means that the temperature on Mars can be as low as -225 degrees Fahrenheit, a fatal level of cold. People can freeze to death at temperatures above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the freezing point of water.
The lack of meaningful water vapor on Mars is another factor that allows heat to escape when the sun sets, Lada noted.
Although that doesn’t mean Mars has no weather. And, in some sense, it is similar to the weather on Earth.
Both Mars and Earth have seasons, strong winds, clouds and electricity-filled storms.
The clouds on Mars are probably made up of water ice, but don’t produce rain – also thanks to the bitter cold.
“This precipitation most likely takes the form of frost,” NASA scientists said. “The ground is likely to be colder than the air (especially on cold clear nights), and so air hitting the ground cools and the water freezes to the ground as frost. Viking II (a Mars lander in the 1970’s) saw frost on the ground some mornings.”
The Curiosity rover has been tracking Martian weather since it landed in the Gale Crater in 2012. The crater is in the southern hemisphere of Mars near the equator.
On December 1, the high temperature at the crater was 25 degrees Fahrenheit and the low was -96 degrees.
