Shredding the Gnar!

The coolest thing around town aka dry ice was super exciting to learn about last Friday at JPL! I Was in awe when Serina Diniega started talking about how she did field tests with the dry ice trying to recreate the gullies she was researching on Mar’s South Pole. I also thought that her idea of astronauts snow boarding on mars was a super funny and clever idea. I did some more looking into how that would be possible.

           Diniega’s idea of sand dune snowboarding sounds awesome but I thought I would look into other possible areas of Mars where you could also do a little bit of snowboarding or skiing. In the south pole of mars there is a both a section of ancient ice possibly and a dry ice section. It wouldn't be ideal to try the ice section  because skiing or snowboarding on icy surfaces is a lot harder and requires more skills and really good equipment. Next are the possibly powdery dry ice sections of the South Pole. Some scientists think that there might be snow fall of dry ice during the cold seasons on mars. It would take a lot longer to gain speed while on Mars due to the less amount of gravity compared to Earth. However, the big plus of that though would mean one would be able to catch a lot more air because of this lack of gravity! The last aspect of going down hill on the dry ice section is that when dry ice heats up is starts to sublimate which means it goes straight to gas. That means when going down hill due to the friction of one on the board going down the slope one then create a very small layer of gas or air between you and the CO2 snow below you. This would then make you have less control and possibly make it to unsafe to make it down the slope. So if you don’t have a need for speed, enjoy tricks and flips, and have a thirst for an adrenaline rush then snow boarding or skiing on Mars is the fit for you.  

 Check out how cool this possible Mars dry ice snow might look like. They lack the beautiful structures of earths snow flakes and are about 100x smaller. 

Also how cool would this be if one did something similar to this on Mars but had some dry ice put on the the bottom of the boogie boards! Sign me up!