MARS WEATHER, MEASURED

What is the temperature on Mars right now?

There is a rover on Mars that still measures the air every single sol. These are its numbers, not an estimate.

Latest measurement
Loading the measurement…
NASA releases these through a public feed a few sols behind, so the latest reading is always slightly in the past. We show the date it was measured.

Why the range is so wide

The air on Mars is less than one percent of Earth's. Thin air holds almost no heat, so the ground warms quickly in sunlight and loses everything again after dark. A single day can swing more than sixty degrees.

Ground temperature swings even harder than air temperature, because the surface itself is what the sun heats. That is why the two rows above rarely match.

Pressure rises and falls once every Mars year, as carbon dioxide freezes onto the polar caps in winter and returns to the atmosphere in summer. About a quarter of the whole atmosphere takes part in that cycle.

The numbers people usually ask for

Average temperatureabout -63 °C over the whole planet
Warmest recordedabout +20 °C, near the equator at midday in summer
Coldest recordedabout -140 °C, at the winter pole
Atmospheric pressureabout 600 to 1,000 Pa, roughly 0.6 % of Earth's
Length of a day24 hours 39 minutes 35 seconds (one sol)
Length of a year687 Earth days

The ground remembers what it is made of

Two places at the same latitude can be a different temperature at night, and the reason is what the ground is made of. Rock and bedrock hold the day's heat and cool slowly. Dust and sand let it go almost at once.

Mars Odyssey has been recording that difference in the infrared since 2001. On the KUON MARS map you can switch that layer on and see it: the bright places are rock, the dark places are dust.

It is not a temperature reading — the published mosaic is a visual representation only — but it tells you something the elevation map cannot.

See it on the map

Questions

Is it colder than Antarctica?
Yes, usually. The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth is about -89 °C at Vostok. Mars reaches about -140 °C at the winter pole, and its planet-wide average of about -63 °C is colder than any average on Earth.
Could a person feel the cold?
Not in the way you would expect. The air is so thin that it carries very little heat to or from your skin, so the air temperature alone would not chill you quickly. The lack of pressure and oxygen is what would kill you, long before the cold.
Does it ever get above freezing?
The air, rarely and briefly, near the equator at midday in summer. The ground, more often — the surface can pass 0 °C while the air a metre above it stays far below.
Where do these numbers come from?
The Curiosity rover's REMS instrument at Gale Crater, released by NASA/JPL-Caltech through a public feed. We store each sol as it arrives and draw missing sols as gaps rather than filling them in.
Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech · Centro de Astrobiología (CAB), Curiosity REMS. Humidity and wind are not published — the wind sensor was damaged early in the mission — so we do not show them.