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TORONTO — A Canadian-built weather station on NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds.

“Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars,” said Jim Whiteway of York University in Toronto, lead scientist for the Canadian Meteorological Station on Phoenix.

“That is snow falling from the clouds.”

“We’ll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground,” he said.

Data collected show the snow vaporizing before reaching the surface.

A laser instrument, the lidar, designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars, detected snow from clouds about four kilometres above the spacecraft’s landing site.

The lidar shoots pulses of laser light into the Martian sky, measuring components of the atmosphere such as dust, ground fog and clouds, from the surface up to a range of 20 kilometres.

Read more @ ctv.ca

After traveling 422 million miles since its launching last Aug. 4, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is aiming for a touchdown on Sunday in the unexplored northern regions of Mars. But first, it must survive what its developers call the final “seven minutes of terror” to reach the surface.

Read the Full article at The New York Times.