NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover sighted streaks of sunlight illuminating a cloud bank on February 2, 2023 as the sun dipped below the horizon. These lights are known as crepuscular rays. It was the first time they had been seen so clearly from Mars.
A study in night glow
Curiosity captured the images during the twilight cloud survey, which is based on 2021 observations of clouds noctilucent, nocturnal glow. Most of the clouds on Mars are less than 60 kilometers above the ground and are made up of water ice, the clouds in the latest images appear to be at higher altitudes, where it is especially cold. That implies they are made of carbon dioxide ice, or dry ice.
Cloud studies on Mars
Las martian clouds They are just like on Earth, providing information necessary to understand the climate. Scientists can study the temperature of the atmosphere through the clouds. Cloud sounding provides a detailed view of the structure of a cloud as it moved. Although the recent study began in January and will end in mid-March, it relies more on the rover’s Mastcam color camera, which helps scientists see how cloud particles grow over time.
The rays of light were not the only thing that Curiosity captured. On January 27, she saw a set of colored feather-shaped clouds. resembling an arc called iridescence. “When we see iridescence, it means that the particle size of a cloud is identical to that of its neighbors in every part of the cloud,” Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist at the Boulder Institute for Space Sciences in Colorado, said in a statement. “By looking at the color transitions, we see that the size of the particles is changing throughout the cloud. That tells us about the way the cloud is evolving and how its particles are changing size over time.” he concluded he.
Mars and constant discoveries
The ‘Hubbie’ telescope has spent more than 30 years analyzing everything from exoplanets to the expansion and behavior of the universe -particularly on planets like Mars-, throughout 2022 it made unique discoveries. NASA scientists found particles that could be explained by the existence of a parallel universe where the laws of physics would be reversed.