By Vania Raebel | October 4, 2019
The South Pole
Now, don’t mistake this image for a worm track or alien ant farm. This is actually a photo taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2016 of the planet’s south pole. And yup, your eyes are not deceiving you: it is brown.
According to NASA, the southern polar cap on Mars is comprised mainly carbon dioxide or dry ice. This does not occur naturally on our home planet. The round pits you see are holes in the layers of dry ice. Each Martian year, these layers of dry ice expand by a few meters.
