How do you see the clouds on Mars? Well, a new video sewn of images captured by NASA Curiosity Rover offers a look. In this video, delicate red and green-green clouds are seen to drift through the Martian sky in striking patterns that resemble the clouds of the earth. Studying how and where Mars are formed, these clouds can help scientists better understand their impact on the climate of the planet.
The images, which were captured on January 17 by one of the two cameras on board CuriosityIt presents “noctilucent” or twilight clouds: captured clouds that rose so high in the sky of Mars that are illuminated by sunlight even when it is night on the planet’s surface. The snapshots were collected for 16 minutes and accelerated about 480 times to result in the previous video, according to a statement For the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built curiosity and leads the mission.
These twilight clouds, which are made of carbon dioxide ice, also known as dry ice, can be seen at the top of the new images. They floated between 37 and 50 miles (60 to 80 kilometers) on the surface, where it is colder than on the surface and causes carbon dioxide in Mars’s atmosphere to condense in clouds. You can see some of the ice crystals raining on the surface as thick white feathers before disappearing approximately 31 miles (50 kilometers) high, where they are evaporated due to the increase in temperatures.
This marks the fourth year of Mars, curiosity has witnessed the appearance of these clouds, which generally appear at the beginning of autumn in the southern hemisphere of the planet, according to the JPL statement. They were seen for the first time in 1997 by NASA’s pathfinder mission from northern Mars Ecuador.
“I will always remember the first time I saw those iridescent clouds and I was sure that at the beginning it was a color artifact,” Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist at the Colorado Space Institute, who directed a paper Summarizing the first two seasons of Curiosity cloud observations, he said in the statement. “Now it has become so predictable that we can plan our shots in advance; the clouds appear exactly at the same time of the year.”
Last September, scientists announced the Most extensive map on Mars Created, gathered from two decades of images captured by the orbiter of the European Space Agency (ESA) Mars Express. The map cataloged a remarkable variety of cloud patterns that occur on Mars, including some different from anything seen on Earth.
“The clouds on Mars are as diverse and fascinating as the ones we see in our heavens on earth,” Daniela Tirsch, a planetary geologist at the German Aerospace Center, who participated in the catalog, said at that time.
However, why the twilight clouds have not been observed in other parts of Mars remains a puzzle for Lemmon and other scientists. For example, the perseverance rover has not detected twilight clouds since it landed in the Jezero crater in 2021, which is located in the northern hemisphere, further north than Pathfinder’s location. Curiosity too I didn’t see them until 2019Almost seven years after landing at the Gale crater, just south of the Ecuador de Mars.
“It was not expected that carbon dioxide will condense on ice here, so something is cooling to the point that it could happen,” Lemmon said in the statement.
It is possible that certain regions are more likely to form them, he says, as areas where waves in the atmosphere known as gravity waves cool the atmosphere enough to freeze carbon dioxide molecules and sculpt the resulting clouds.
“But,” Lemmon added, “Martian gravity waves are not completely understood and we are not completely sure of what is causing crepuscular clouds in one place but not in another.”
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