NASA rover observes aurora on Mars in visible light for first time
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took this snapshot of Mars 11 hours before the planet made its closest approach to Earth on August 26, 2003. REUTERS/J. Bell (Cornell U.) and M. Wolff (SSI)/NASA/File Photo
WASHINGTON - NASA's Perseverance rover has observed an aurora on Mars in visible light for the first time, with the sky glowing softly in green in the first viewing of an aurora from any planetary surface other than Earth.
Scientists said the aurora occurred on March 18, 2024, when super-energetic particles from the sun encountered the Martian atmosphere, precipitating a reaction that created a faint glow across the entire night sky. Auroras have been observed previously on Mars by satellites from orbit in ultraviolet wavelengths, but not in visible light.
The sun three days earlier had unleashed a solar flare and an accompanying coronal mass ejection - a huge explosion of gas and magnetic energy that brings with it large amounts of solar energetic particles - that traveled outward through the solar system. Mars is the fourth planet from the sun, following Mercury, Venus and Earth.
Scientists had simulated the event in advance and prepared instruments on the rover to be ready to observe the expected aurora. Perseverance has two instruments that are sensitive to wavelengths in the visible range, meaning they detect colors human eyes can see. The researchers used the rover's SuperCam spectrometer instrument to identify exactly the wavelength of the green glow and then used its Mastcam-Z camera to take a snapshot of the softly glowing green sky.
An aurora forms on Mars the same way as on Earth, with energetic charged particles colliding with atoms and molecules in the atmosphere, exciting them, and causing subatomic particles called electrons to emit light particles called photons.
"But on Earth, the charged particles are channeled into the polar regions by our planet's global magnetic field," said Elise Wright Knutsen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo's Center for Space Sensors and Systems and lead author of the study published this week in the journal Science Advances.
"Mars has no global magnetic field so the charged particles bombarded all of Mars at the same time, which leads to this planet-wide aurora," Knutsen added.
The green color occurred because of the interaction between the charged particles from the sun and oxygen in the Martian atmosphere. While auroras can be brilliant, as often seen in Earth's northernmost and southernmost regions, the one observed on Mars was quite faint.
"This specific aurora we observed on March 18th of last year would have been too faint for humans to see directly. But if we get a more intense solar storm, it could become bright enough for future astronauts to see. And with a camera, such as an iPhone, you would clearly see it, rather like how an aurora on Earth is always brighter in images than with the naked eye," Knutsen said.
This particular event did not impact Earth.
All the planets with atmospheres in our solar system experience auroras.
"Various types and wavelengths of aurora have been observed previously from Mars-orbiting satellites. All previous observations have been in the UV, but they have had wildly different shapes. From the global, diffuse aurora we observed now, to discrete arcs and patches near the crustal fields (regional magnetic fields) in the south, and large-scale sinuous shapes," Knutsen said.
If astronauts from Earth visit Mars and perhaps establish a long-term presence on the planet's surface, they may be treated to a nighttime light show.
"During a more intense solar storm, producing a brighter aurora, I think a sky which glows green from horizon to horizon will be eerily beautiful," Knutsen said.
"The aurora will appear as a soft green glow covering more or less the whole sky," Knutsen added. "Dust in the lower part of the atmosphere would obscure some of the light towards the horizon, and if you looked straight up it would also be fainter simply because looking at a slant angle will allow you to see through a thicker section of the atmosphere that is emitting the aurora." — Reuters
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
GMA Network
2 days ago
- GMA Network
Possible new dwarf planet spotted near the edge of the solar system
Cutout images of all 19 detections of the newly identified trans-Neptunian object named 2017 OF201 are seen, from the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) and the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco Telescope, released by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, on May 22, 2025. Jiaxuan Li and Sihao Cheng/Handout via REUTERS WASHINGTON - Scientists have identified an object about 435 miles (700 km) wide inhabiting the frigid outer reaches of our solar system that might qualify as a dwarf planet, spotting it as it travels on a highly elongated orbital path around the sun. The researchers called it one of the most distant visible objects in our solar system, and said its existence indicates that a vast expanse of space beyond the outermost planet Neptune and a region called the Kuiper Belt may not be deserted, as long thought. The Kuiper Belt is populated by numerous icy bodies. Given the name 2017 OF201, the object falls into a category called trans-Neptunian objects that orbit the sun at a distance beyond that of Neptune. The object takes about 25,000 years to complete a single orbit of the sun, compared to 365 days for Earth to do so. The researchers said 2017 OF201 was identified in observations by telescopes in Chile and Hawaii spanning seven years. "It is potentially large enough to qualify as a dwarf planet. Its orbit is very wide and eccentric, which means it experienced an interesting orbital migration path in the past," said astrophysicist Sihao Cheng of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who led the study with collaborators Jiaxuan Li and Eritas Yang, graduate students at Princeton University. Its size is estimated to be a bit smaller than Ceres, which is the smallest of the solar system's five recognized dwarf planets and has a diameter of about 590 miles (950 km). Pluto, the largest of those dwarf planets, has a diameter of about 1,477 miles (2,377 km). The mass of 2017 OF201 is estimated to be about 20,000 times smaller than Earth's and 50 times smaller than Pluto's. "We don't know the shape yet. Unfortunately it is too far away and it is a bit difficult to resolve it with telescopes," Cheng said. "Its composition is totally unknown yet, but likely similar to other icy bodies." The discovery was announced by the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union, an international organization of astronomers, and detailed in a study posted on the open-access research site arXiv. The study has not yet been peer reviewed. Earth's orbital distance from the sun is called an astronomical unit. 2017 OF201 is currently located at a distance of 90.5 astronomical units from the sun, meaning 90.5 times as far as Earth. But at its furthest point during its orbit, 2017 OF201 is more than 1,600 astronomical units from the sun, while the closest point on its orbit is about 45 astronomical units. That means it sometimes is closer to the sun than Pluto, whose orbital distance ranges from 30 to 49 astronomical units as it travels an elliptical path around the sun. The researchers suspect that the extreme orbit of 2017 OF201 may have been caused by a long-ago close encounter with the gravitational influence of a giant planet. "We still don't know much about the solar system far away because currently it is difficult to directly see things beyond about 150 astronomical units," Cheng said. "The presence of this single object suggests that there could be another hundred or so other objects with similar orbit and size. They are just too far away to be detectable right now." The five dwarf planets recognized by the International Astronomical Union are, in order of distance from the sun: Ceres, which is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, then Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris, which all orbit beyond Neptune. The organization defines a planet and a dwarf planet differently. A planet must orbit its host star - in our case the sun - and must be mostly round and sufficiently large that its gravitational strength clears away any other objects of similar size near its orbit. A dwarf planet must orbit the sun and be mostly round but it has not cleared its orbit of other objects. Cheng said the discovery of 2017 OF201 has implications for hypotheses involving the potential existence of a ninth planet in our solar system, dubbed Planet X or Planet Nine. This is because 2017 OF201's orbit does not follow the pattern exhibited by other known trans-Neptunian objects, which tend to cluster together. Some scientists had hypothesized that such clustering was caused by the gravity of a yet-to-be discovered planet. "The existence of 2017 OF201 as an outlier to such clustering could potentially challenge this hypothesis," Cheng said. — Reuters
GMA Network
5 days ago
- GMA Network
China launches mission to retrieve asteroid samples
WASHINGTON —China on Wednesday embarked on its first mission to retrieve samples from a nearby asteroid with the nighttime launch of its Tianwen-2 spacecraft, a robotic probe that could make the fast-growing space power the third nation to fetch pristine asteroid rocks. China's Long March 3B rocket lifted off around 1:31 a.m. local time from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center carrying the Tianwen-2 spacecraft, which over the next year will approach the small near-Earth asteroid named 469219 Kamo?oalewa, some 10 million miles away. Chinese state media Xinhua confirmed the launch of Tianwen-2 and dubbed it a "complete success." Tianwen-2 is scheduled to arrive at the asteroid in July 2026 and shoot a capsule packed with rocks back to Earth for a landing in November 2027. The mission is the latest example of China's swiftly expanding space programs, a streak of cosmic achievements in recent years that includes landing robots on the far side of the moon, running its own national space station in orbit and investing heavily in plans to send humans to the lunar surface by 2030. Japan's Hayabusa that fetched samples from a small asteroid in 2010 marked the world's first such mission. Japan did it again in 2019 with its Ryugu mission, followed by the first U.S. asteroid retrieval mission, OSIRIS-REx, that brought back samples from the Bennu asteroid in 2020. Kamo?oalewa, the target asteroid for Tianwen-2, is known as a quasi-satellite of Earth, a close celestial neighbor that has orbited the sun for roughly a century, according to NASA. Its size is anywhere between 120 feet (40 meters) and 300 feet (100 meters).—Reuters
GMA Network
5 days ago
- GMA Network
SpaceX's Starship spins out of control after flying past points of previous failures
SpaceX's next-generation Starship spacecraft atop its Super Heavy booster that was launched from Starbase, is seen from South Padre Island, Texas, US, May 27, 2025. REUTERS/Gabriel V. Cardenas STARBASE, Texas - SpaceX's Starship rocket roared into space from Texas on Tuesday but spun out of control about halfway through its flight without achieving some of its most important testing goals, bringing fresh engineering hurdles to CEO Elon Musk's increasingly turbulent Mars rocket program. The 400-foot tall (122 meter) Starship rocket system, the core of Musk's goal of sending humans to Mars, lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase, Texas, launch site, flying beyond the point of two previous explosive attempts earlier this year that sent debris streaking over Caribbean islands and forced dozens of airliners to divert course. For the latest launch, the ninth full test mission of Starship since the first attempt in April 2023, the upper-stage cruise vessel was lofted to space atop a previously flown booster - a first such demonstration of the booster's reusability. But SpaceX lost contact with the 232-foot lower-stage booster during its descent before it plunged into the sea, rather than making the controlled splashdown the company had planned. Starship, meanwhile, continued into suborbital space but began to spin uncontrollably roughly 30 minutes into the mission. The errant spiraling came after SpaceX canceled a plan to deploy eight mock Starlink satellites into space - the rocket's "Pez" candy dispenser-like mechanism failed to work as designed. "Not looking great with a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today," SpaceX broadcaster Dan Huot said on a company livestream. Musk was scheduled to deliver an update on his space exploration ambitions in a speech from Starbase following the test flight, billed as a livestream presentation about "The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary." Hours later, he had yet to give the speech and there was no sign that he intended to do so. In a post on X, Musk touted Starship's scheduled shutdown of an engine in space, a step previous test flights achieved last year. He said a leak on Starship's primary fuel tank led to its loss of control. "Lot of good data to review," he said. "Launch cadence for next 3 flights will be faster, at approximately 1 every 3 to 4 weeks." SpaceX has said the Starship models that have flown this year bear significant design upgrades from previous prototypes, as thousands of company employees work to build a multi-purpose rocket capable of putting massive batches of satellites in space, carrying humans back to the moon and ultimately ferrying astronauts to Mars. Risk-tolerant The recent setbacks indicate SpaceX is struggling to overcome a complicated chapter of Starship's multibillion-dollar development. But the company's engineering culture, widely considered more risk-tolerant than many of the aerospace industry's more established players, is built on a flight-testing strategy that pushes spacecraft to the point of failure, then fine-tunes improvements through frequent repetition. Starship's planned trajectory for Tuesday included a nearly full orbit around Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean to test new designs of its heat shield tiles and revised flaps for steering its blazing re-entry and descent through Earth's atmosphere. But its early demise, appearing as a fireball streaking eastward through the night sky over southern Africa, puts another pause in Musk's speedy development goals for a rocket bound to play a central role in the US space program. NASA plans to use the rocket to land humans on the moon in 2027, though that moon program faces turmoil amid Musk's Mars-focused influence over US President Donald Trump's administration. Mishap probe Federal regulators had granted SpaceX a license for Starship's latest flight attempt four days ago, capping a mishap investigation that had grounded Starship for nearly two months. The last two test flights - in January and March - were cut short moments after liftoff as the vehicles blew to pieces on ascent, raining debris over parts of the Caribbean and disrupting scores of commercial airline flights in the region. The Federal Aviation Administration expanded debris hazard zones around the ascent path for Tuesday's launch. The previous back-to-back failures occurred in early test-flight phases that SpaceX had easily achieved before, in a striking setback to a program that Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who founded the rocket company in 2002, had sought to accelerate this year. Musk, the world's wealthiest individual and a key supporter of Trump, was especially eager for a success after vowing in recent days to refocus his attention on his various business ventures, including SpaceX, following a tumultuous foray into national politics and his attempts at cutting government bureaucracy. Closer to home, Musk also sees Starship as eventually replacing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in the company's commercial launch business, which already lofts most of the world's satellites and other payloads to low-Earth orbit. — Reuters
