When molten magma oozes up from a planet's mantle onto the surface of the outer crust, it usually freezes into igneous rock of a type that geologists call a basalt. Most rocks on Mars are expected to be basalts lower in silicon. If these are in fact andesites, they are probably not very abundant. Measurements of the day and night sides of Phobos show such extreme temperature variations that the sunlit side of the moon rivals a pleasant winter day in Chicago, while only a few kilometers away, on the dark side of the moon, the climate is more harsh than a night in Antarctica. This has to be an incredibly fine powder formed from impacts over millions of years, and it looks like the whole surface is made up of fine dust.
Large boulders appear to be partly buried in the surface material.
The warming trend is causing part of Triton's frozen nitrogen surface to turn into gas, thus making its thin atmosphere denser. Elliot and his colleagues from MIT, Lowell Observatory, and Williams College published their findings in the June 25 issue of Nature . Even with the warming, no one is likely to plan a summer vacation on Triton, which is a bit smaller than Earth' s moon. If Earth experienced a similar change in global temperature over a comparable period, it could lead to significant climatic changes. Triton, however, is a very different and simpler world than Earth, with a much thinner atmosphere, no oceans, and a surface of frozen nitrogen.