Sky companion
The latest daily weather report from NASA’s Curiosity rover in Gale Crater, side by side with the weather where you are, and what season and time it is on Mars right now.
Curiosity’s weather station reports reach this public feed in batches, so the newest report is usually a few weeks old. Temperatures are the air beside the rover; times are local solar time at the rover.
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Mars seasons are counted by where Mars is in its orbit, an angle called solar longitude that runs from 0° at the start of northern spring to 360°. Each season is 90°, but because the orbit is lopsided they range from about 142 to 194 Mars days long. Season names here are for the northern hemisphere, the usual convention. Curiosity sits just south of the equator, where the seasons are reversed. Mars years are counted from Mars Year 1, which began on April 11, 1955.
Every Mars year, as much as a quarter of the planet’s air freezes out as carbon dioxide frost on the winter pole, then turns back to gas in spring. At Gale Crater the pressure swings by about a fifth, so one weather station can watch the whole atmosphere breathe in and out.
A Mars month is 30° of solar longitude, so the months run from about 46 to 67 sols long. Averages cover the sols with a full report.
Clouds form wherever a gas can condense. Change the gas and the temperature and you get very different skies.
Sulfuric acid droplets
A deck of clouds starting about 30 miles up wraps the whole planet and reflects most of the sunlight that reaches it. The cloud tops race around Venus in about four Earth days, though the planet itself takes 243 days to turn once.
Water ice, carbon dioxide ice, dust
Thin, wispy water-ice clouds much like our cirrus, morning fog in low craters, and a hood of cloud over the winter pole. The Phoenix lander watched snow fall from Martian clouds and vanish before reaching the ground: virga, as on Earth.
Ammonia ice, ammonium hydrosulfide, water
Three cloud layers stacked by temperature, drawn into bright zones and dark belts by jet streams. The Great Red Spot is a high-pressure storm wider than Earth that has spun for at least 150 years.
Methane and ethane
The only other world known to have rain falling on lakes and seas. Here the rain is liquid methane, falling through air thicker than ours onto a surface near −290°F.
Methane ice
Bright methane-ice clouds ride the fastest winds measured on any planet, over 1,200 miles per hour. Its dark storms come and go within a few years.
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Mars data: Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS) on NASA’s Curiosity rover, provided by Centro de Astrobiología (CSIC-INTA) through NASA/JPL-Caltech for public outreach. Mars calendar and clock: computed in your browser from the NASA Goddard Mars24 method (Allison and McEwen, 2000). Your weather: Open-Meteo. These organizations do not endorse Amphibian Publishing.