{"id":148709,"date":"2025-09-11T10:31:22","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T10:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/148709\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T10:31:22","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T10:31:22","slug":"aurora-over-mars-gives-red-planet-a-green-glow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/148709\/","title":{"rendered":"Aurora over Mars gives Red Planet a green glow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just like Earth, our cosmic neighbor Mars<\/a> sometimes has auroras dance across its night sky. In March 2024<\/a>, NASA\u2019s Perseverance Mars rover imaged visible-light auroras<\/a> for the first time during a major solar flare and coronal mass ejection. That exciting discovery confirmed that future astronauts on Mars<\/a> could see (and feel) the impacts of the aurora and opened up some exciting new research possibilities.<\/p>\n

Scientists now believe that they have the tools to predict an aurora\u2019s green glow in the night sky above Mars. Today in Helsinki, Finland, planetary scientist Elise Wright Knutsen<\/a> of the University of Oslo presented a second photo of a Martian aurora at the Europlanet Science Congress\u2013Division of Planetary Science (EPSC\u2013DPS) Joint Meeting<\/a>.<\/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<\/a>, who also was the science lead for the first image of a martian aurora seen from the ground.<\/p>\n

\"Four<\/p>\n

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 colours 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 coloured boxes show (from top to bottom): the theoretical aurora color for these images, the average sky colour, and the bottom boxes show the sky colour with the aurora signal removed or added, for left and right column respectively. This is to show what the colour 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

How the aurora works<\/p>\n

Aurorae appear in the night sky when a burst of energetic particles in a solar wind are hurled out by a coronal mass ejection<\/a> on the sun. These particles collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere of Earth\u2019s magnetic field, causing them to glow. It\u2019s sort of like the sun is burping at us, only instead of a noise, we see bright lights dance across the night sky.<\/p>\n

Aurora activity is typically highest at the North and South Pole, but even places in the topics like Key West, Florida<\/a> have been lucky enough to see this natural wonder.<\/p>\n

On Earth, they come in a variety of colors depending on which types of atoms are present. According to the Canadian Space Agency<\/a>, green auroras occur when charged particles collide with high concentrations of oxygen molecules in Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Red auroras are less common than green. They are more associated with intense solar activity and are caused by solar particles reacting with oxygen at higher altitudes (about 180 to 250 miles high). Rare blues and purples occur when the solar particles interact with the nitrogen in Earth\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

On the Red Planet, aurorae glow green because the charged particles collide with oxygen atoms high above Mars<\/a>. They may be bright enough that astronauts on Mars could spot them with their naked eye. Here on Earth, it\u2019s usually helpful to have a telescope or even a phone camera filter<\/a> to really see the aurora.<\/p>\n

Since Mars does not have a magnetic field<\/a> to direct the charged particles to the magnetic poles the way Earth does, aurorae here are seen all across the planet as a glow in the sky that is spread out like a thin fog. Scientists call this a diffuse aurora<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Aurorae on Mars have previously been observed from orbit in ultraviolet light<\/a> by the European Space Agency\u2019s (ESA) Mars Express. NASA\u2019s MAVEN missions have also detected auroras glowing in ultraviolet light that is invisible to the human eye.<\/p>\n

The addition of visible-light detections like the ones taken in March 2024 offer more for aurora predictions. While they are stunning to look at, the same radiation that causes the aurora could be dangerous to astronauts without warning. Having a warning system<\/a> for when a powerful solar storm will hit Mars is important if humans are ever going to survive on the planet\u2019s rocky surface.<\/p>\n

[ Related: 15 captivating photos of auroras seen from space<\/a>. ]<\/p>\n

The tricky business of predicting an aurora on Mars<\/p>\n

On Mars, the observations to predict an aurora have to be planned and uploaded to the rover three days after a CME bursts out of the sun in the direction of Mars. This means a lot of guesswork as to which solar storms will produce an aurora.<\/p>\n

\u201cPredicting aurora down to an exact minute is incredibly challenging! But there are different challenges on Earth and Mars,\u201d Knutsen tells Popular Science. \u201cOn Earth the aurora is limited to a specific area, it has a relatively narrow shape, and it is highly variable. But we can keep checking new data on Earth and adjust our forecast and consequent observations. On Mars there is no way for us to adjust our observation time.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that three day lead time, scientists have to lock in a time for only a few minutes. However, aurorae on Mars cover the entire planet, and last for several hours.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo there is more margin for error, so to speak,\u201d says Knutsen<\/p>\n

Between 2023 and 2024, Knutsen and her team made eight attempts to view the aurora with Perseverance\u2019s SuperCam and MastCam cameras<\/a>. They found this to be a true process of trial and error.<\/p>\n

On their first three attempts, they did not see anything. However, when analyzing the conditions that NASA\u2019s MAVEN and the ESA\u2019s Mars Express orbiters measured, they realized that the velocities of those CMEs were likely not fast enough to create a solar wind disturbance on 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.<\/p>\n

To adjust, they targeted more intense CMEs. That\u2019s when they found their first two detections of aurorate. The final three CMEs did not produce aurorae, even though they had all of the signs that the team was looking for. However, just because there were no aurorae does not mean all was lost.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most surprising part after three failed attempts, was that we did succeed in the end! Which meant that our strategy for predicting and our observation technique all worked,\u201d says Knutsen. \u201cIt is incredibly gratifying when you work from a quite concrete hypothesis, and your results finally match your expectations.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are still a lot of mysteries locked inside the aurora\u2019s glow<\/a> both at home and on Mars. In the future, the team hopes to keep comparing the timing of solar wind and the arrival of solar energetic particles at Mars to further understand how they work\u2013and better prepare future astronauts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just like Earth, our cosmic neighbor Mars sometimes has auroras dance across its night sky. In March 2024,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[92097,196,92096,79,193],"class_list":["post-148709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-elise-wright-knutsen","tag-mars","tag-mars-rover","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}