NASA‘s Perseverance rover has captured an aurora in the night sky for the first time from the Martian ground.
Scientists have known for two decades that Mars‘ skies have auroras, too, but these curtains of undulating light had only been detected in ultraviolet — light that is invisible to the naked eye — until now. All previous Martian auroras were observed from orbiters in space.
The result is a grainy portrait, shown farther down in this story, reminiscent of the snow one might remember seeing on an old television when it lost a signal. But it represents a monumental achievement, said Elise Wright Knutsen, first author of the research from the University of Oslo in Norway. A paper on the unprecedented observation was published in the journal Science Advances on May 14.
“The photo was taken with an instrument not necessarily optimized for nighttime imagery, and so it isn’t like the spectacular aurora images we have from Earth,” Knutsen told Mashable. “But hopefully people will appreciate the softly glowing green sky, regardless of the image being rather pixelated.”
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