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"Diamond Dust" Snow Falls Nightly on Mars

from National Geographic News

Every night during Mars's winter, water-ice crystals fall from high, thin clouds over the north pole, new data from NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander have revealed.

The clouds resemble cirrus clouds on Earth, noted lead study author James Whiteway, an atmospheric physicist at York University in Toronto. And the precipitation, he said, is similar to ice crystals that fall through the air in the Arctic in the middle of winter, called diamond dust.

All told, though, there's very little water locked up in the drifting ice crystals, said co-author Peter Smith, principal investigator for the Phoenix mission and a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, Tucson.