First aurora visible to the naked eye on Mars
Researchers have managed to find the perfect moment, during a violent solar flare, to observe a green aurora in the sky of the Red Planet. It is also the first time that a visible aurora has been observed from a planet other than our own.
The year 2024 was a year characterized by intense solar activity, ideal conditions for observing with the naked eye, for the first time on Mars, the spectacle of an aurora, in every way similar to the magnificent luminous phenomena of the polar regions of Earth. “ From the Jezero crater, where it was located, a rover robot took a photo of a mountainous landscape silhouetted against a yellow-green sky, thus giving scientists an authentic snapshot of a phenomenon they could only imagine until then,” reported The Washington Post on May 14. “And it is also the first time that an aurora has been immortalized from the surface of a planet other than our own .”
A first achieved “ thanks to precise space weather forecasts, NASA’s Perseverance rover and the tenacity of Elise Wright Knutsen’s team,” explains The New York Times May 14. “Using two instruments [on the Perseverance rover], we not only identified the exact wavelength (557.7 nm) corresponding to green light, but also photographed the bright sky,” the atmospheric physicist at the University of Oslo, Norway, whose work has just been published, told the British website IFLScience.
Courrier International
