Uncover the mystery of the mystery of an 1,800-kilometer-long cloud on Mars

After its discovery in the seventies of the twentieth century on Mars, scientists began to understand the origin of a strange cloud about 1,800 km long, which appeared daily for several months from one of the most large volcanoes of the red planet. September 2018, and a Russian probe photographed it in the seventies of the last century, it aroused the interest of scientists, according to a statement released Tuesday by the European Space Agency. But watching her was difficult; As its location on the planet prevented it from being monitored by probe devices for very short periods of time.

The European Agency’s statement quotes Jorge Hernandez Bernal of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao as saying that the team that studies Martian clouds was able to find the cloud using a “secret tool from Mars Express “, an optical surveillance camera called” VMC “This camera, whose precision is equivalent to that of a normal webcam, was in the short time in 2003, shortly after the launch of” Mars Express “, then became extinct and was only used intermittently in certain educational tasks. The probe has been in orbit around Mars since late 2003.

However, what sets the “VMC” camera apart from the more advanced scientific devices of the probe; Because it has a “wide field of vision (…) and is well suited to follow the evolution of a phenomenon”, explained Bernal, who participated in the preparation of a study on the subject published in the latest issue of the journal “Geophysical Research”. Observation of the cloud showed that it was forming before sunrise. Every morning on the interior face of the Arsia Mons volcano, for several of the twelve earth months that make up the spring and summer of March.

The cloud is made up of glacial water vapor, and it rises with the onset of sunrise to a height of about forty kilometers, much higher than the summit of the ancient volcano, which has a height of about 17 kilometers. Then, the winds extend it towards the west at a speed of up to 600 kilometers per hour over a length of 1,800 kilometers. This phenomenon does not last more than two and a half hours before the cloud disappears under the rays of the sun.

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