Curiosity Rover captures the colorful clouds floating above Mars

The red and green colored clouds drift through the Mars sky with a set of new images captured by NASA’s Curiosity Rover using Mastcam. Images taken on January 17th for 16 minutes (4,426th Mars Day, or Sol on Curiosity’s mission) show the latest observations of what is called Noctilucent (Latin for “Night Shining”) or Twilight Clouds. It’s there. Spread light from the sunset.

Sometimes these clouds create rainbows of color, and even produce rainbow clouds, or “mother’s mother” clouds. If it is too faint to be visible in the daytime, the clouds will be particularly high and only visible when the evening falls.

Mars clouds are either made from either water ice or carbon dioxide ice at higher altitudes and lower temperatures. (The atmosphere on Mars is more than 95% carbon dioxide.) The latter is the only kind of cloud observed on Mars, with clouds that produce rainbow colors, and are in the new image at an altitude of about 37-50 miles. It can be seen near the top (60 to 60 to 80 km).

It also appears that a white plume falls from the atmosphere, moving 31 miles (50 km) lower on the surface before evaporating due to rising temperatures. Temporarily visible at the bottom of the image is a cloud of water ice moving in the opposite direction of approximately 31 miles (50 km) above the rover.

Twilight Cloud Dawn

Twilight Clouds were first seen on Mars in 1997 by NASA’s Pathfinder mission. Curiosity didn’t find them until 2019 when they acquired their first rainbow image in the clouds. This is the fourth Mars that Rover has observed a phenomenon occurring in the early autumn of the Southern Hemisphere.

Mark Lemon, an atmospheric scientist at the Institute of Space Sciences in Boulder, Colorado, published in a geophysics research letter late last year, the first two seasons of curiosity, Twilight Cloud observations. He led a paper summarizing the

“When I first saw these rainbow clouds, I always remember, but at first I was sure it was a few colour artifacts,” he said. “It’s now predictable, so you can plan your shots ahead of time. Clouds appear at the exact same time.”

Each sighting is an opportunity to learn more about the particle size and growth rate of Mars clouds. This provides detailed information about the planet’s atmosphere.

Cloud Mystery

One major mystery is why dim clouds made of carbon dioxide ice have not been discovered elsewhere on Mars. Curiosity, which landed in 2012, is located at Mount Sharp, Gail Crater, just south of the equator on Mars. Pathfinder landed at Ares Vallis, north of the equator. Located in the Gezero Crater in the Northern Hemisphere, NASA’s patient rover has not seen any carbon dioxide ice twilight clouds since its 2021 landing. Lemon and others suspect that certain regions of Mars may tend to form them.

A possible source of clouds could be gravitational waves, he said, which can cool the atmosphere: “It was not expected that carbon dioxide would condense here into ice.” So something is cooling it to the point that it could happen. It’s not fully understood, what is the Twilight cloud forming in one place, but another I’m not entirely sure if it’s not formed in the place.”

Mastcam’s partial view

The new Twilight Cloud appears to be surrounded by a partially open circle. That’s because it was filmed using one of Mastcam’s two color cameras. The focal length of the left, Mastcam, has a filter wheel packed between its positions. The Curiosity team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California can use both this camera and a high-resolution right-focal length camera for color imaging.

The rover is on its way to a new location that recently envelops an investigation into a location called the Gediz Vallis Channel, containing fractures formed from groundwater that look like giant spider webs when viewed from space.

More recently, Curiosity visited the Impact Crater nicknamed “Rustic Canyon” and captured it with images and studied the composition of the rocks around it. The 67 feet (20 meters) diameter crater is shallow and has lost much of its rim to erosion, indicating that it likely formed millions of years ago.

One reason the science team at Curiosity is studying craters is that the crater process can excavate long embedded materials that may better preserve organic molecules than rocks exposed to surface radiation. is. These molecules provided a window into the ancient Martian environment, and could have supported microbial life billions of years ago, even if it formed on the red planet.