The Polar Vortex weather event is freezing America as I write this, but the media are saying that it is as cold as the surface of Mars. This is wrong. Mars is very cold at night due to the thin atmosphere. Mars` atmosphere is as thin as ours at 100,000 feet. This means that the planet loses warmth very quickly when the sun goes down. It gets down to -73 degrees Celsius at night and -125 degrees Celsius at the poles. It can be 20 degrees Celsius during the day, but once the sun goes down the temperature will plummet extremely quickly. There are snowfalls of carbon dioxide frost on Mars, this gives an indication of how cold it can get at night. So the Mars One crew will need some quality technology and good spacesuits to keep them alive if they have to go outside at night to fix something. Pluto gets down to -233 degrees Celsius, so that planet is much colder still. But that is cold enough to freeze methane and ammonia, so we will not be going there soon. But I wish that the media would get this straight. If the Polar Vortex was as cold as Mars, it would have more of an effect.
Mars does not have a magnetic field like Earth does, this means that it cannot reflect the radiation from the Sun like our planet does with the powerful magnetic field of the Earth. And our thick atmosphere. We are better protected on Earth than we ever would be living on Mars, unless we could live underground. There might be massive cave systems on Mars that we could build inside and wall off to create a workable shelter for the Mars One crew. That would be easy to heat and provide protection from solar radiation. Getting back to Earth, the lowest temperature ever on Earth was -89.2 degrees Celsius in 1983. This was in Antarctica. But this is nowhere near the -125 polar temperature on Mars. This whole thing is quite amazing, I did not think that it could get this cold in America, but here we are. I wonder if New York harbor could freeze over and allow the residents to ice skate on the frozen water. But there is so much media hype over this event, they need to get their facts straight.
Read more about martian weather here: http://www.space.com/16907-what-is-the-temperature-of-mars.html.