Mars has an atmosphere! #MarsIsCool
The air pressure is less than 1% of Earth’s. Though thin, it’s there. It’s composed of trace amounts or oxygen with carbon dioxide making up 96% of the atmosphere.
For comparison, Earth’s atmosphere is 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen.
Ionized particles from Mars’ atmosphere trail behind it from the solar wind interacting with it ionosphere.
Obviously, no one is going to breathe on Mars unaided. Besides lacking oxygen, it’s too thin It would be like trying breath the air 20+ miles above the Earth’s surface.
All of this is today. I wonder what Mars was like millenia ago. Perhaps it had an atmosphere that supported life. We know it had water.
I took this into account when writing my novel, The Music of Mars. If you’d like to learn more about my upcoming book, follow me on Twitter and Facebook.
I’m an author living in northern Virginia with a wife and a cat. In the late ’80s, I worked on the International Space Station project. I recently retired from managing a group of software engineers to focus on writing science fiction and speculative fiction. Learn more.