The National Auronautics and Space Administration (NASA), recently shared video capturing aurora lights acoss Mars planet at night. The images showed how magical aurora lights covered the Red planet with purple hue. These images were captured by NASA’s Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument aboard NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) orbiter
NASA instrument Maven captured these images between May 14 and May 20 this year. THe spacecraft continued to hover around Mars capturing views of its nightside. The instrument was launched 10 years ago in 2014. The US space agency will celebrate its 10th anniversary at Mars in September this year.
The aurora lights were tracked by the NASA instrument in the form of purple lights. Although these lights are not purple in colour in reality, but the colour was used to trace the presence of auroras over Mars’s sky. The brighter the colour over the planet, more auroras were present on the sky.
The NASA instrument traced these auroras as waves of energetic particles from a solar storm. The purple pattern over the planet stopped suddenly when the most energetic particles arrived and overwhelmed the instrument with noise, the US space agency explained in its Instagram post.
How Auroras on Earth are different from those occurring on Mars?
Auroras are colourful lights which are visible when energy particles emanating from solar storms travel down the magnetic field lines of a planet. Auroras visible on Earth and on other planets are different. As Earth planet is shielded by a robust magnetic field, these lights are normally restricted to regions near the poles.
Whereas, Mars has lost its internally generated magnetic field in the ancient past. Hence, when the charged particles enter Mars’ atmosphere, there’s no protection from the barrage of energetic particles. When charged particles hit the Martian atmosphere, it results in auroras that engulf the entire planet.
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Published: 14 Jun 2024, 03:04 PM IST