Amazing! Mars has water, clouds and snow! Not quite the full skiing holiday you understand and I know Mars does look a bit bleak, writes Phil Becque. But this is great news for Mars lovers. Click on the image to see the glorious animation.

This sequence combines 32 images of clouds moving eastward across a Martian horizon. The Surface Stereo Imager on NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander took this set of images on 18 Sept 2008, during early afternoon hours of the 113th Martian day of the mission.

The view is toward the north. The actual elapsed time between the first image and the last image is nearly half an hour. The numbers inset at lower left are the elapsed time, in seconds, after the first image of the sequence. The particles in the clouds are water-ice, as in cirrus clouds on Earth.

Phoenix landed in the northern region of Mars on May 25, 2008. The mission is led by the University of Arizona, Tucson, on behalf of NASA. Project management of the mission is led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Spacecraft development is by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver.

Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University