Temperatures of the Martian atmosphere as deduced by Mars Pathfinder.
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Courtesy of NASA.
Mars Atmospheric Temperature Profile, from Mars Pathfinder
The temperatures in the atmosphere of Mars are doggone cold! This is a graph which shows the temperatures measured in the atmosphere by Mars Pathfinder as it decended through the nighttime air and landed on the surface. The temperature of the atmosphere is listed on the bottom of the graph, and the altitudes where the temperatures are found within the atmosphere are listed along the leftmost edge. The graph shows that near the surface where Pathfinder landed (at night) the temperature was 170 oK (-150 F), in the middle of the atmosphere the temperature got a lot colder, at 70 oK (-333 F), and at the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere the temperatures ranged from 150 to 300 oK (-190 to 80 F). This region of the atmosphere is called the ionosphere, or sometimes the exosphere. It is the region of the atmosphere closest to space, and is the one which is first exposed to the sun's rays.
Compare the temperatures in these different regions of the atmosphere to those of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus.
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