{"id":18354,"date":"2025-09-15T19:25:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T19:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/18354\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T19:25:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T19:25:12","slug":"perseverance-rover-captures-elusive-martian-aurora-for-a-second-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/18354\/","title":{"rendered":"Perseverance Rover Captures Elusive Martian Aurora for a Second Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\"Mars<\/a>Scientists have captured visible-light images of auroras glowing green above Mars, thanks to NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover. (Artist\u2019s concept). Credit: SciTechDaily.com<\/p>\n

Scientists using NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover have captured visible green auroras on Mars and developed tools to predict them.<\/p>\n

Planetary scientists say they can now forecast when a green aurora will appear in Mars\u2019s night sky, supported by new images.<\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover recorded the first visible-light aurora from the Martian surface in 2024. At the Europlanet Science Congress\u2013Division of Planetary Science (EPSC\u2013DPS) joint meeting in Helsinki this week, Dr Elise Wright Knutsen of the University of Oslo will present a second Perseverance image and, more importantly, a method for predicting when aurorae will occur on Mars.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that we captured the aurora again demonstrates that our method for predicting aurorae on Mars and capturing them works,\u201d said Knutsen, who was also the science lead for the first image of a martian aurora seen from the ground.<\/p>\n

Aurorae arise when bursts of energetic particles in the solar wind, released during a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun, collide with atmospheric molecules and make them emit light. On Mars, these charged particles strike oxygen atoms high above the planet, producing a green glow bright enough to be seen by astronauts with the unaided eye.<\/p>\n

Unlike Earth, Mars lacks a global magnetic field to steer incoming particles toward polar regions. As a result, aurorae can spread across the entire nightside as a broad glow in the sky, a phenomenon known as \u2018diffuse\u2019 aurora.<\/p>\n

\"Four<\/a>Four images from Perseverance\u2019s Mastcam-Z. The left hand-side images show both detections of the aurora, on 18 March and 18 May 2024. On the right are non-detections with comparable sky illumination (from Mars\u2019s moons) to show the contrast in colors between a night with aurora and a night with no aurora. The March event was about twice as intense as the May event. The sky was also much dustier in May, which led to fewer stars being visible. The sky is generally much brighter and warmer in color in March due to Phobos, Mars\u2019s largest moon, being in the sky. The colored boxes show (from top to bottom): the theoretical aurora color for these images, the average sky color, and the bottom boxes show the sky color with the aurora signal removed or added, for left and right column respectively. This is to show what the color of the sky would have been, theoretically, with no aurora that night, or with aurora for the comparison images. If all conditions were identical, then the two bottom boxes should diagonally have the same color, which worked close to perfectly for the May event. Below the images is the spectra from the rover\u2019s SuperCam that identifies the green glow as the 557.7nm atomic oxygen auroral emission, indicated by the vertical green line. The solid lines are the real measurements for the two detections, while the dashed lines show our aurora model, demonstrating that the calculations estimating the aurora\u2019s brightness from the surface with the measured dust amount corresponds very well with the observed aurora intensity. Credit: Elise Wright Knutsen et al.<\/p>\n

The same radiation that causes the aurora could also potentially be dangerous to astronauts without warning that they must take shelter, so having some idea of when a powerful solar storm will hit Mars is crucial if humans are going to one day survive on the surface.<\/p>\n

Predicting Martian Auroras<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, predicting aurorae on Mars is a complex business. Observations have to be planned and uploaded to the rover three days ahead once a CME bursts out in the direction of Mars. This means a lot of guesswork as to which solar storms will produce an aurora.<\/p>\n

Knutsen\u2019s team made eight attempts to view the aurora with Perseverance\u2019s SuperCam and MastCam cameras between 2023 and 2024, and they found it to be a process of trial and error. The first three attempts saw nothing, but by retrospectively analyzing conditions as measured by NASA\u2019s MAVEN and the ESA\u2019s Mars Express orbiters, Knutsen and her colleagues realized that the velocities of those CMEs had likely not been fast enough to create a solar wind disturbance at Mars.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe faster the CME, the more likely it is to accelerate particles towards Mars that create aurorae, and the stronger the solar wind disturbance around Mars, the more likely it is that those particles make it into Mars\u2019s nightside atmosphere,\u201d said Knutsen. \u201cLater, we progressively targeted faster, more intense CMEs, and that\u2019s when we found our first two detections.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unsolved Mysteries<\/p>\n

The final three CMEs also didn\u2019t produce aurorae, even though they met the criteria that Knutsen was looking for.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe last three non-detections are more curious,\u201d she said. \u201cStatistically, there is also a degree of randomness to these things, so sometimes we\u2019re just unlucky. This perhaps isn\u2019t that surprising, since predicting the aurora on Earth down to minute precision isn\u2019t an exact science either.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aurorae on Mars have previously been observed from orbit in ultraviolet light by ESA\u2019s Mars Express and NASA\u2019s MAVEN missions. Now, with the addition of visible-light detections, there is a growing dataset of observations for improving the accuracy of the aurora predictions. With further observations to come, they will hopefully help solve some ongoing mysteries about how the auroral lights are triggered on Mars.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is still much we don\u2019t understand about how aurora occur on Mars as, unlike Earth, there is no global magnetic field to guide energetic solar particles onto the nightside where the aurora can be seen,\u201d said Knutsen. \u201cComparing the timing of solar wind disturbances, the arrival of solar energetic particles, and the intensity and timing of aurora will advance our knowledge in this area.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reference: \u201d Green-line aurora detection attempts from the surface of Mars \u201d by Elise Wright Knutsen, Timothy H. McConnochie, Mark Lemmon, Shayla Viet, Agnes Cousin, Roger C. Wiens and James F. Bell, 8 July 2025, EPSC Abstracts.
DOI: 10.5194\/epsc-dps2025-1314<\/a><\/p>\n

This research was funded by the Research Council of Norway, and the NASA Mars 2020 Program.<\/p>\n

Never miss a breakthrough: Join the SciTechDaily newsletter.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists have captured visible-light images of auroras glowing green above Mars, thanks to NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover. (Artist\u2019s concept).…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18355,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[1409,14910,10561,85,46,2758,9796,141,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-18354","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-astronomy","9":"tag-aurora","10":"tag-europlanet","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-mars","14":"tag-planetary-science","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}