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A popular new video shows the gentle but eerie scene as clouds drift above the surface of Mars.
The images were taken from cameras mounted on the Curiosity rover, which continues to explore the surface of the Red Planet.
Although the recently arrived Perseverance rover has been the center of much of the attention on Mars in recent weeks, it is one of several rovers to surface. Others like Curiosity continue to try to better understand the planet.
The eight new images, taken by the navigation camera aboard this robot explorer, show approximately five minutes of time on the surface. As such, clouds can be seen moving in a remarkably similar fashion to these clouds on Earth.
They were shot last week and shared by Paul Byrne, a scientist at North Carolina State University.
While the clouds look like ours, the very different atmosphere on the Red Planet – which, among other differences, is very thin – means they must form in different ways.
To form clouds, water molecules must condense around the particles. On Earth, it may be grains of dust carried by winds, but Mars does not have an atmosphere thick enough to form them so easily.
On Mars, these are believed to be the result at least in part of the dust created when space debris hit the Martian atmosphere. This creates the particles around which clouds can form and then see them as they move across the surface.
The thin atmosphere is also why clouds on Mars are similar to cirrus clouds on Earth – wispy and light, rather than thick and puffy.
Clouds on Mars can also be “nocturnal” – lit by the sun, even at night, because they are so high above the Martian surface.
It’s not the only weather on Mars that looks like what it does on Earth, but it’s actually remarkably different. In 2008, the Phoenix lander found snow was falling to the surface.
But if this snow looks like ours in the pictures, it’s made up of carbon dioxide – like dry ice.
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