(Image: Neil Stevens)
Weary of Whistler? Find Davos dull? For a vacation with a difference, blast off with our winter sports guide to the best off-earthly snow and ice
Few things spell the holiday season like a sprinkling of snow. It may not always be the cold white stuff we’re accustomed to on Earth, but there’s plenty of opportunity for future space explorers to have winter fun in the solar system … and beyond.
Heavy-metal snow
As the solar system’s innermost planet, Mercury is generally much too hot for a white Christmas. In some spots, however, natural freezers have harboured ice for billions of years. In a single polar crater on Mercury, daytime temperatures can soar above 250 °C, yet patches in shadow stay cold enough to preserve water ice. There is plenty of it, too – , with even more buried beneath a thin layer of dust. You could have lunch in a crater’s sunny centre (safe from radiation in a special suit) and walk over to a frozen water deposit for an afternoon round of curling.
A little further from the sun, boiling Venus is too hot for snow as we know it. But the planet does get its share of metallic frosting. Temperatures are hot enough to vaporise minerals like pyrite, aka fool’s gold, which then falls through the atmosphere as water droplets do on Earth. Volcanoes also pump elements like tellurium into the sky. At high altitudes, this .
To reach the finest Venusian champagne powder, skiers…
