With blistering conditions and zero protective magnetic field to keep mankind from turning into cosmic ice pops, Mars is no picnic. Still, scientific minds remain focused on unlocking the meteorological secrets of the Red Planet.

One such mind belongs to Larry Guan, the graduate student in the University of Houston’s Department of Physics who’s just been credited with solving one of those Martian mysteries.

Under the wings of his advisers from the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (professors Liming Li of the Department of Physics and Xun Jiang of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences) and with the collaboration of several planetary scientists, Guan helmed groundbreaking research, producing the planet’s first-ever meridional profile and further laying the foundation for understanding Martian climate.

The study, “Distinct Energy Budgets of Mars and Earth,” was published in Earth and space science journal “AGU Advances” and will be featured in AGU’s prestigious magazine, Eos. In it, Guan and his team share how they used data collected from the orbital spacecraft Mars Global Surveyor to observe the flow of energy on Mars and, notably, generate Guan’s meridional profiles — measures of energy entering or leaving a line of latitude — at seasonal and annual time periods.

“Our research improves upon a concept that was already well-known,” Guan says. “Energy budget studies are not new; we’re just the first to do it on a more granular time and space scale. Hopefully, we can use these numbers to improve Martian climate models.”

Key findings of Guan’s research reveal a Martian atmosphere in sharp contrast to Earth’s. Where we experience a surplus of energy at the tropics and deficit at the poles, Mars is the opposite — and with global- scale dust storms rocking the planet’s energy budget and “massive polar ice caps made of solid carbon dioxide bleeding into the atmosphere,” Guan says.

Guan describes his discovery as “standing on the shoulders of giants” and is quick to give credit where it’s due. After touting his advisers, Li and Jiang, he endorses the efforts of former UH graduate student Ellen Creecy, who “did a lot of the legwork,” and his officemate Xinyue Wang, who was his pinch hitter in academia.

“We were both the designated substitutes for each other’s work, in the sense that if I had to cover for her presentation, or if she had to cover for mine, we knew just enough to be able to do so,” he says of Wang.

Other study contributors include Anthony Toigo from Johns Hopkins University, Mark Richardson from Aeolis Research, Yeon Joo Lee from the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea and Agustín Sánchez-Lavega from Universidad del País Vasco in Spain.

Germán Martínez from the Lunar and Planetary Institute shouldered the responsibility of ensuring the team’s arguments were scientifically sound. “If I ever see him, I’m buying him a drink,” Guan says.

The most challenging part of the study, according to Guan, was justifying the novelty of their result.

“It took a lot of consultation with external collaborators — hundreds of quite tedious back-and-forth email exchanges — that ultimately made the paper marketable and got it across the finish line,” he says.

With his dissertation in the can and a breakthrough study in the books, you might think this Houston native would be eager to begin unearthing more quandaries deep within our galaxy. But just as the reserve of every ball of gas in the sky inevitably burns out, so too has the star of this study.

After decoding the weather patterns on Mars, the only code Guan is interested in now is Morse, from a cockpit. “I’m taking a year off,” he says. “Maybe I’ll learn to fly a plane or something."