Mars hasn’t always been a dry, dusty, desolate planet. It used to be a much nicer place with an atmosphere and oceans of water. The ravages of time, however, have not been kind to this little planet, leaving it with a host of bizarre features.
- Fourth planet from the sun.
- If our sun is the goal post of a CFL football field, Earth would be at the two-yard line; Mars on the three.
- Half the size of Earth; its red colour is because iron in the rocks and soil has rusted.
- Rotation: 24.6 hours.
- Revolution: 687 days. It has an egg-shaped orbit due to Jupiter’s powerful gravitational field tugging on it.
- Tilted 25 degrees gives Mars four distinct seasons.
- Mean temperature: -65 degrees Celsius.
- Two tiny moons: Phobos is 22 kms in diameter and Deimos is even smaller at 13 kms. Shaped like potatoes, they may actually be captured asteroids.
- A thin atmosphere of 95% carbon dioxide.
- Mars’ small size meant it couldn’t retain enough heat to drive plate tectonics. Without tectonics, it lost its protective magnetic field, and as a result, its atmosphere is gradually being stripped away by the sun’s solar wind.
- Lack of plate tectonics is what allowed Olympus Mons to grow into the largest volcano in the solar system at three times the height of Mount Everest.
- Of the abundant water Mars once possessed, some is frozen in the polar ice caps, some is trapped inside minerals in the planet’s crust, and the rest escaped into space.
- A massive crack called Valles Marineris spans nearly a quarter of its surface. At 4,800 km long, 320 km wide, and 7 km deep, it is ten times larger than Earth’s Grand Canyon.
