Blowing Up Mars:

The Red Planet Like You've Never Seen It Before

When William Wergin and his partner Eric Erbe came up with a new technique for magnifying snowflakes a few years ago, little did they dream that NASA might take their idea to Mars. NASA, the National Atmospheric and Space Administration, is the space agency for the United States.

Erbe and Wergin are microscopists (my-CROSS-kuh-pists). They work at an Agricultural Research Service laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland. There, they used a special microscope to produce some of the largest and most detailed images of snowflakes ever seen.

Snowflakes are made up of trillions of frozen water molecules. But why study them? Most people would rather throw snowballs!

Erbe and Wergin want to learn better ways of predicting how much water will be available to western farmers. Most of their water for crops starts out as snowflakes. The flakes fall on the mountains during winter and melt in the springtime, filling rivers and streams. And that’s where many farmers get the water to grow their crops.

The microscope the scientists used to study snowflakes is called a scanning electron microscope (SEM). More recently, they used it to produce the first photos of frozen carbon dioxide. CO₂ is made of carbon and oxygen. And frozen CO₂ is called “dry ice,” because it evaporates to a gas without becoming a liquid.

Carbon dioxide gas freezes at extremely cold temperatures—about minus 240 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s nearly 300 degrees colder than water, which freezes at 32^o F. To produce their photos, researchers had to cool the scanning electron microscope down to minus 320^o F. Brrrrrr!

Their SEM photos show what frozen CO₂ crystals look like from many different sides.

NASA scientists became excited about these photos of frozen CO₂. They want to use SEM technology to find out more about Mars, where frozen CO₂ is abundant.

NASA wants to send a fleet of spacecraft and special landers to Mars. The mission: beam back loads of information about the planet’s atmosphere, soil, climate—and polar ice caps.

Earth and Mars are the only two planets in our solar system with polar ice caps. On both planets, the poles get larger and smaller as seasons change. These changes play big roles in climate and weather. Check THIS out!

Earth’s caps are, of course, made of water. But the polar caps on the Red Planet are mostly frozen CO₂ .

Over the next 10 years, a series of Mars Global Surveyor crafts will be readied for the mission of studying the Martian atmosphere with high-powered telescopes. The 'scopes will keep a particularly watchful “eye” on the Martian ice caps.

Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will be drawing on information about frozen CO₂ crystals gained from Erbe and Wergin. Then, the NASA scientists may for the first time be able to measure the changing thickness of the Martian ice caps.

--By Hank Becker, formerly with the Information Staff, Agricultural Research Service

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