New photographs captured through NASA’s Curiosity rover display colourful clouds within the sky over Mars.
The photographs have been captured through the rover’s Mastcam, which NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in comparison to the rover’s eyes. The clouds have been noticed on Jan. 17, and the pictures have been taken over the process 16 mins, the distance company said in a news release.
The clouds, referred to as noctilucent or twilight clouds, include frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice. They’re tinted with colours when the atmosphere Solar scatters gentle. That colour has ended in them being nicknamed “mother-of-pearl” clouds.
Whilst Mars’ environment is 95% carbon dioxide, few of its clouds are at a prime sufficient environment and occasional sufficient temperature to include frozen carbon dioxide. Maximum clouds on the earth are manufactured from water ice. The clouds photographed through Interest are at an altitude of 37 to 50 miles above the planet’s floor. Different photographs display the clouds as white plumes falling during the environment, ahead of evaporating about 31 miles above Mars.
The twilight clouds have best been noticed in some spaces of Mars’ southern hemisphere. NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which landed on Mars’ northern hemisphere in 2021, has no longer observed the clouds because it landed, however Interest has observed them within the southern hemisphere in 4 other Mars years.
Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist with the Area Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, instructed NASA that he believes sure areas of the planet are much more likely to shape the clouds. Gravity waves, which cool a planet’s environment, is usually a issue, he mentioned.
“Carbon dioxide used to be no longer anticipated to be condensing into ice right here, so one thing is cooling it to the purpose that it would occur,” Lemmon mentioned in NASA’s information unlock. “However Martian gravity waves don’t seem to be totally understood and we are not fully certain what’s inflicting twilight clouds to shape in a single position however no longer any other.”
Even if researchers do not completely know the way the clouds are shaped, they are able to are expecting when and the place they’re going to seem. Lemmon, who used to be a lead researcher on a 2024 paper detailing Interest’s first two years of cloud observations, mentioned the phenomenon has “turn out to be so predictable that we will plan our photographs prematurely.”
The brand new cloud pictures are not the one knowledge Curiosity has despatched again to NASA in contemporary weeks. The rover lately investigated a spot known as the Gediz Vallis channel, the distance company mentioned.
It additionally visited an have an effect on crater nicknamed “Rustic Canyon” to take pictures and learn about the rocks across the crater. The 67-foot large crater most likely shaped tens of millions of years in the past, in line with the erosion of the website, NASA mentioned.
The rover will proceed directly to a brand new location that comes with what NASA known as “boxwork,” or fractures within the planet’s floor shaped through groundwater. When observed from area, the fractures seem like large spiderwebs, NASA mentioned.
