Mars weather

The season on Mars right now

It’s the start of northern spring, and autumn in the southern hemisphere. Mars’s position around the Sun, called solar longitude (Ls)Season (Ls)Ls is Mars’s position around the Sun in degrees — 0° starts northern spring, 90° summer, 180° autumn and 270° winter — so it tells you the season.More in the glossary, is 4.5° today.

Season names follow Mars’s northern hemisphere, as scientists do. Curiosity is just south of the equator, in Gale Crater.

Recent readings from Gale Crater

The newest sols Curiosity’s weather station has published, as of Oct 4, 2026.

°C as published, with °F calculated. Pressure in pascals (Pa). Wind and humidity aren’t in this feed. Earth dates are the day of each sol’s midday at Gale Crater.[1]

How cold is Mars?

Very cold. NASA puts the average surface temperature at about −65 °C (−85 °F), with a range from about 20 °C (68 °F) at the warmest to about −153 °C (−243 °F) at the coldest.[2][3] The thin air holds little heat, so days and nights differ a lot: standing at the equator at noon, NASA says, it would feel like spring at your feet and winter at your head.[2]

At Gale Crater, Curiosity’s weather station measured air from 15.9 °C (60.6 °F) on a summer afternoon down to −100 °C (−148 °F) on a winter night in its first two Mars years.[4]

Why is the air on Mars so thin?

Because most of it was lost to space. NASA’s MAVEN orbiter found that “most of the gas ever present in the Mars atmosphere has been lost to space,” stripped away mainly by the solar wind and the Sun’s radiation.[18] What is left is mostly carbon dioxide, and the pressure at the surface is only about 0.6% of Earth’s.[6] Every winter some of that air freezes onto the pole as carbon-dioxide ice, then turns back into gas in spring. That makes the air pressure across the whole planet rise and fall by about 25% to 30% over a Mars year.[4][5]

How big do dust storms get on Mars?

Every year, dust storms cover areas the size of continents for weeks at a time. About once every three Mars years (about 5½ Earth years), storms grow until they circle the whole planet. The big ones usually come in southern summer, NASA says, and even in the strongest storms the wind tops out at about 97 km/h (60 mph), likely too weak to tip over or tear apart big machines.[7]

In June 2018 a storm turned global and darkened the sky over NASA’s Opportunity rover.[8] The solar-powered rover last called home on Jun 10, 2018, and NASA ended its mission in February 2019.[9]

Smaller whirlwinds, dust devils, sweep across the plains. Perseverance filmed one about 60 m (200 ft) wide and about 2 km (1.2 mi) tall in August 2023.[10] Its SuperCam instrument has recorded 55 small electrical discharges in dust devils and storms since 2021.[11]

Why are sunsets on Mars blue?

By day the Martian sky looks hazy and reddish, because of the dust hanging in it.[2] At sunset the sky around the Sun turns blue: the very fine dust lets blue light through slightly better and scatters it close to the Sun’s direction. Curiosity photographed a blue sunset in April 2015.[12]

Does it rain or snow on Mars?

It doesn’t rain: the air is too thin for liquid water to last.[2] But it snows. In 2008 NASA’s Phoenix lander saw snow falling from clouds about 4 km (2.5 mi) up and vaporizing before it reached the ground.[13] Near the south pole in winter, snow made of frozen carbon dioxide falls too, the only known carbon-dioxide snow in the solar system.[14] Most Martian clouds are made of water ice and float no more than about 60 km (37 mi) up.[15]

How do rovers measure the weather?

Curiosity carries a weather station called REMS, built and run by Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología, with sensors for wind, pressure, humidity, air and ground temperature, and ultraviolet light.[16] Its daily readings are published for outreach, weeks after they are taken; the card at the top of this page shows the newest one.[1] Perseverance has its own weather station, but its public daily feed stopped updating in April 2024.[17]

Sources

1. Centro de Astrobiología (CSIC-INTA) via NASA — REMS weather feed (Curiosity)Primary · checked Oct 4, 2026
2. NASA Science — Mars: FactsPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
3. NASA Science — Temperatures Across Our Solar SystemPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
4. NASA JPL — Second Cycle of Martian Seasons Completing for Curiosity RoverPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
5. NASA Photojournal — PIA16912: Seasonal Pressure Curve Peaks at Gale CraterPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
6. NASA NSSDCA — Mars Fact SheetPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
7. NASA — The Fact and Fiction of Martian Dust StormsPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
8. NASA JPL — Martian Dust Storm Grows Global; Curiosity Captures Photos of Thickening HazePrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
9. NASA JPL — NASA’s Opportunity Rover Mission on Mars Comes to EndPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
10. NASA JPL — NASA’s Perseverance Captures Dust-Filled Martian WhirlwindPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
11. NASA JPL — NASA Rover Detects Electric Sparks in Mars Dust Devils, StormsPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
12. NASA JPL — NASA’s Curiosity Rover Views Serene Sundown on MarsPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
13. NASA JPL — NASA Mars Lander Sees Falling Snow, Soil Data Suggest Liquid PastPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
14. NASA JPL — NASA Observations Point to Dry Ice Snowfall on MarsPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
15. NASA JPL — NASA’s Curiosity Rover Captures Shining Clouds on MarsPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
16. Centro de Astrobiología (CSIC-INTA) — REMS: Rover Environmental Monitoring StationPrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026
17. NASA — MEDA weather feed (Perseverance)Primary · checked Oct 4, 2026
18. NASA — NASA’s MAVEN Reveals Most of Mars’ Atmosphere Was Lost to SpacePrimary · checked Oct 4, 2026