# Tag Info

93

Firstly, Mars has a mean distance from the Sun of 1.524 AU, so by the inverse square law the energy it gets from the Sun is about 40% of what the Earth gets. But the main reason that Mars is so cold is that its atmosphere is very thin compared to Earth's (as well as very dry, see below). From Wikipedia Atmosphere of Mars: The atmosphere of Mars is much ...

34

Forget about magnification. People who know telescopes don't think in terms of magnification. What matters is the angular resolution, or the resolving power: the angular size of the smallest details that you could see in an instrument. Rule of thumb: the resolving power of a telescope with a diameter of 10 cm is 1 arcsecond when using visible light. The ...

27

I'm just going to expand and deepen on what the other answers already said. In the following I contrast the atmospheric transmission ($T$) and absorption ($A$, which is $A=1-T$) of Mars and Earth. The Mars plot (top) is from Prof. J. Irwin via this review by P. Read et al. 2015 and the terrestrial data (bottom) is from wikipedia. The plots of $A$ and $1-T$...

23

"It's believed that the Earth was rotating about once every 5 hours before the theorized collision with a Mars sized coorbiting object referred to as Theia." Almost. Theia did not have to be co-orbiting, just an intersecting orbit. We have no idea what the Earth's spin was before the collision, but it is theorized that the Earth rotation had a 5 hour ...

23

The stars are so immensely far away that to the human eye there would be no noticeable difference. The nearest stars are moving roughly 1.5 arcsecond wrt. the background when viewed from Earth's position with half a year's interval (i.e. half a revolution around the Sun). Mars' orbit is only 50% larger, but the human eye cannot resolve better than roughly ...

16

Our own magnetic field is generated by convection currents in Earth's liquid outer core. A useful summary from Physics.org: Differences in temperature, pressure and composition within the outer core cause convection currents in the molten metal as cool, dense matter sinks whilst warm, less dense matter rises. This flow of liquid iron generates ...

16

Mars does have a greenhouse effect, only somewhat weaker than Earth's. Mars' atmosphere is very dilute, with a with a surface pressure only 0.6% of Earth's. So even if 95% of it is CO2, that's not a lot. However, it is actually a higher absolute abundance of CO2 molecules than on Earth, which only has a CO2 abundance of 0.04% (by volume; e.g. NOAA, ...

15

The most likely candidate would be the Tardigrade. These little guys handle vacuum and radiation just fine. So long as water is provided, according to tests done in LEO the Tardigrade would survive on Mars. Even if they do dehydrate, they spring back to life once water is provided again.

15

We actually have a very good idea of this because the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been orbiting Mars for over a decade. The MRO is, basically, a spy satellite around Mars and is continually taking high-resolution photos of the surface. It has revisted much of the surface, taking pictures multiple times over the years. As a consequence, we have a very ...

13

I'll add to Wayfaring Stranger's comments. In fact most of the time you would be able to see fewer stars in the night sky of Mars, than in a good dark night sky on Earth, because of dust obscuration. Even in favourable conditions, the optical depth of the Martian atmosphere is usally somewhere between 0.5 and 1 per airmass. (Petrova et al. 2012; Lemmon et ...

13

According to the Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy (p 33 of my edition), essentially the Greeks took the (not unreasonable) view that the planets that moved more slowly were further away and were orbiting on larger spheres. That's obviously not the same as suggesting they knew "the right distances" to the planets, merely the order. They did develop a ...

12

This is a very interesting question. Of course, as you noted, you have simplified things quite a bit; there are other factors besides temperature that affect habitability. Regarding Venus, you probably know that Venus is extremely hot at its surface not just because it is closer to the Sun, but because it has a thick CO2 atmosphere and is warmed by the ...

12

tl;dr: On Earth, atmospheric molecules scatter blue light more than red. In contrast, on Mars atmospheric, $\mu\mathrm{m}$-sized hematite dust particles happen to give the opposite effect. Scattering theory First a bit of theory. Pretty pictures later. Scattering cross section Scattering of light of wavelength $\lambda$ on particles of radius $r$ may be ...

12

I looked at the image and annotated it based on what it most likely is: In black is the formation itself. In blue is a depression underneath it. In grey is part of the boundary of what you believed to be the disappeared half. In green is a ridge to the north. In red are several craters. Here's a more likely hypothesis for what this actually is. The ...

11

Many models shown in books or television show a very populated asteroid belt but in fact the belt is mostly empty. To answer your question, the inclination of the asteroids vary a lot going from 0° to 40° although most off them are in between 0° and 30°; See The orbital element distributions of real and modelled asteroids. So yes it would be 3 dimensional.

11

The effect is called apparent retrograde motion. What happens is that Mars has a 'direction opposite to that of other bodies within its system as observed from a particular vantage point' when this loop occurs. That's a bunch of words that don't mean a lot to me. A picture is worth a thousand clearer words: (Imagine this turned sideways and you get the ...

11

Are Tharsis Montes and Hellas Basin a result of the same event? You were not the first to have seen that the Hellas Basin and parts of the Tharsis Rise are roughly antipodal (Peterson 1978, Williams and Greeley 1994). The Tharsis Montes themselves are far too close to the equator to be considered antipodal to the Hellas Basin. The shield volcano Alba Mons ...

10

The impact of Phobos, even in one piece (less likely), would be different from Chicxulub. Phobos is probably a little larger than the Chicxulub impactor, but much slower, and comes in almost perfectly tangential. The impact energy would be less than a 10th of the Chicxulub impact, and the energy would be distributed over a large region around the Martian ...

10

The loss of the Martian atmosphere can be mostly attributed to its mass. The reason why Earth still has an atmosphere made of lighter elements is because with larger mass comes larger escape velocity, which is the speed at which an atom's kinetic energy overcomes the gravitational potential energy of its planet. The distribution of speeds of most gasses can ...

10

Mars definitely has far less Iron than Earth. Mars has 10.7% of Earth's mass. On the other hand, Iron comprises 32% of Earth since there is so much Iron in its inner core, outer core, and the mantle. That means if Mars was made entirely of Iron (which it is not), Earth would still have more than 3 times as much Iron. You are right that Mars has more Iron at ...

10

Either or neither. It's impossible to tell from the present. If runaway climate change occurs, then yes, the conditions on Venus could be a potential analogue for the kind of environment on Earth due to the greenhouse effect. Mars's atmosphere is assumed to have been much thicker in the past, otherwise it could not have sustained liquid water on the ...

10

I was on the targeting team for one of the cameras that discovered most of these new impact craters. The reason for the distribution is simply because it's easiest to find "new" impact craters in the dusty regions of Mars. Often what we see is the dark-toned blast zone created by the impact in lower-resolution data, which has a large areal footprint. Then, ...

10

The Hubble space telescope has a 2.4m mirror and is pretty much diffraction limited, so at near-UV wavelengths of say 240nm it has an angular resolution of about $10^{-7}$ radians. Mars' closest distance to Earth is about 54.6 million km, so the theoretical minimal resolution is between 5 ad 6 km. So large cities might be visible if they have lots of ...

9

The circumstellar habitalbe zone can be defined as the distance range around a star, where the mean temperature of a rotating planet would be between 0 and 100 centigrades, if radiation (heat) received from the star and thermal radiation emitted by the planet form an equilibrium. But that's only a rule of thumb. It has been redefined, and is still disputed. ...

9

If you are asking about short-term effects related to human's effect on the climate, the answer is (obviously) unclear. But in the very long term, Earth is likely to evolve to a more Venus-like state. Over the next billion years or so, the Sun's luminosity will slowly increase, which will heat Earth's surface. As a result, more water vapor will evaporate ...

9

Liquid water can in principle exist at many locations on present-day Mars, but there are a few interesting twists to the story. At low elevation, the atmospheric pressure is high enough. The triple point pressure of H2O is 611 Pascal, which corresponds to about mid-elevation. At low elevations, such as the northern lowlands, the atmospheric pressure will ...

9

There's another answer here claiming that an off-axis aperture mask will improve things. That is a fairly popular meme, but it's entirely incorrect, and makes misleading claims about the effects of the central obstruction. All that does is it hides existing problems with the instrument. If the off-axis hole appears to improve things, something else is very ...

9

Such transit events occur when Earth and Mars are simultaneously at a node where their orbital planes intersect. Between transits at the same node, both Earth and Mars must complete whole numbers of orbits, where 1 Mars year = 1.8808 Earth years. Meeus and Goffin 1983 identify patterns of 79-year and 284-year intervals: 79.0 Earth years ≈ 42.0 Mars ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible