Mars

Ten things about the fourth planet that are actually true.

Presented by Meadow. Use the arrows, or tap the sides of the screen.

Size

Half the planet, all the land

Mars is just over half as wide as Earth. But Earth is covered in ocean, and Mars isn't — so the amount of dry ground on Mars is almost exactly the same as the amount of dry ground on Earth.

55.9 million square miles of it, and nobody is standing on any of it.

Olympus Mons

13.6 mi tall. Two and a half times the height of Mount Everest, and the biggest volcano in the solar system.

Its base would cover most of Arizona. It's so wide that the sides only slope about 5 degrees — if you were standing on it, the ground would look flat and the summit would be over the horizon. You could climb the tallest mountain in the solar system without ever noticing you were going uphill.

Earth's crust slides around, so our volcanoes get dragged off their hot spots and stop growing — that's why Hawaii is a chain of islands instead of one giant one. Mars' crust doesn't move. Olympus Mons sat over the same vent and kept stacking up for billions of years.

Valles Marineris

2,500 mi long — a canyon system that would stretch from Los Angeles to New York.

In places it drops more than four miles straight down. The Grand Canyon is about one mile deep, so you could stack four of them and still be looking up at the rim.

How far is that, really?

1.9 million round trips from Larry's Four-Way Stop to Washington Park Elementary. That is how far away Mars is when it is closest.

Larry's to school is about 9 miles, roughly a 15 minute drive. There and back is 18 miles. Mars at its closest is 34 million miles away, so you would have to make that drive about 1,876,000 times to cover it.

Smaller ones, for scale: the canyon on the last slide is 2,500 miles long — 138 round trips, about one for every school day in a year. And Olympus Mons is 13.6 miles tall, so the volcano is taller than the entire drive from Larry's to school.

Light

The sunsets are blue

Earth has a blue sky and a red sunset. Mars has it exactly backwards: the daytime sky is a dusty butterscotch color, and the sun sets inside a cold blue glow.

Martian dust grains are just the right size to let blue light pass straight through while scattering red light off sideways. So near the setting sun, blue is what's left.

Phobos

A moon that rises in the west

Phobos whips around Mars every 7 hours and 39 minutes — faster than Mars itself spins. From the ground it rises in the west, crosses the sky, and sets in the east, twice a day.

It's also falling. Phobos creeps about half an inch closer every year, and in roughly 50 million years Mars' gravity will pull it apart into a ring.

The dust storm myth

The storm in The Martian can't happen

Mars really does get dust storms that wrap the whole planet, and the wind really can hit 60 mph. But the air is so thin — about 0.6% of Earth's — that there's almost nothing in it to push with.

A 60 mph Martian gale would feel like an 8 mph breeze on Earth. It can bury a solar panel in dust. It cannot knock over a rocket or throw a person across a launch pad.

Ingenuity

72 flights by a four-pound helicopter that was only supposed to fly five times.

In April 2021 Ingenuity lifted off and became the first machine to fly under its own power on another world. To get any grip in that thin air, its blades had to spin about 2,500 times a minute — roughly five times faster than a helicopter on Earth.

It flew for nearly three years before a rotor blade was damaged on landing in January 2024. It's still sitting out there.

Air and water

We already made oxygen there

The Martian atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide. A toaster-sized box on the Perseverance rover, called MOXIE, pulled that gas in and stripped the oxygen back out of it — the first time anyone has manufactured a usable resource on another planet.

There's water too, locked up as ice at the poles and buried in glaciers under the dust. It isn't a question of finding it. It's a question of digging.

Time

Your birthday gets rare

A Martian day is 24 hours and 39 minutes — so close to ours that rover teams on Earth just shift their whole schedule 39 minutes later every day to stay on Mars time.

The year is the part that changes everything. Mars takes 687 Earth days to get around the sun, so an 11-year-old here is about 5 and a half there — and would be waiting until their late thirties, Earth time, to turn 20.

Wanted: neighbors

One (1) planet, unoccupied, available immediately to any intelligent life-form who can get here.

To claim: arrange some large rocks into a wave where we can see it from orbit. We're always looking.

Planet sold as-is. Atmosphere not rated for breathing. Management is not responsible for dust.