Remember that giant, planet-wide dust storm that sprung up on Mars in late May? Yeah, well, it’s still going on. Initially thought to be a pretty minor dust-up in one isolated region of the planet, the storm has since engulfed the entirety of Mars, and NASA now has a stunning side-by-side movie that demonstrates just how much the storm has changed the planet.

High-speed winds have kicked up so much dust into the atmosphere that Mars no longer looks like a marbled ball of rock with colored bands, but rather a cloudy sphere with near uniform coloring all around. It’s really, really wild.

I mean just look at that thing. NASA knows that these kinds of planet-spanning storms do happen on occasion — typically every six to eight Earth years — but still have very little clue as to how they are caused. Things like this just don’t happen here on Earth, so it’s taking the scientific community a while to really wrap their heads around it. – READ MORE

The search for evidence of past life on Mars is a long, complicated endeavor that NASA has devoted an incredible amount of time and money to. That investment may pay off one day soon, but in the meantime we’ll have to settle for all the cool non-living sights Mars has to offer, like these “spiders” captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

They’re still creepy and crawly, the spiders NASA is talking about here aren’t living arachnids; they’re bizarre geographical formations that are the result of frozen carbon dioxide that rests below the Martian soil

“Called ‘araneiform terrain,’ describes the spider-like radiating mounds that form when carbon dioxide ice below the surface heats up and releases,” NASA explains in a post. “This is an active seasonal process not seen on Earth. Like dry ice on Earth, the carbon dioxide ice on Mars sublimates as it warms (changes from solid to gas) and the gas becomes trapped below the surface.”

Over time the trapped carbon dioxide gas builds in pressure and is eventually strong enough to break through the ice as a jet that erupts dust. The gas is released into the atmosphere and darker dust may be deposited around the vent or transported by winds to produce streaks. The loss of the sublimated carbon dioxide leaves behind these spider-like features etched into the surface. – READ MORE

\ paper, which was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, focuses on the Viking Program which successfully landed a pair of spacecraft on the Martian surface. Once there, the landers were designed to analyze the planet’s soil and, ideally, discover organic remains that pointed to the presence of life long ago. Things may have gone very wrong from there.

The paper’s lead author proposes that, when the Viking landers heated the soil samples in order to analyze the vapors they produced, they actually caused an ignition. A type of combustible salt called perchlorate was found in the Martian soil back in 2008, but that was decades after the Viking landers had performed their sample readings. The paper suggests that it’s possible the Viking landers accidentally burned up the samples they were trying to test. Whoops!

As Tech Times points out, when the landers relayed their readings back to Earth they were devoid of evidence of organic life. Later missions to the Red Planet did indeed reveal the presence of organic molecules, but those obviously wouldn’t have been present in the Viking data if it had accidentally roasted the samples it was supposed to be analyzing. – READ MORE