The Hope spacecraft, sent by the United Arab Emirates to explore the Martian atmosphere, has captured an exceedingly elusive event on camera. The probe has snapped the most detailed pictures yet of the ‘discrete nightside auroras’ of the Mars, which scientists have struggled to study for decades.
The mission, also called the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), is the first uncrewed, interplanetary satellite by the UAE.
Unlike earth, the red plant has scattered magnetic fields which cause solar wind particles to shoot off in different directions, Charged particles then collide with oxygen in the upper atmosphere, causing it to glow, Images released last week show the auroras standing out in the shape of bright structures set against the dark Martian night sky.
As planetray scientist Justin Deighan explained to The New York Times, it’s as if “you took a bag of magnets and dumped them into the crust of the planet.” “And they’re all pointed different ways,” he added. “And they have different strengths.”
The auroras was spotted by the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer, or EMUS, which was originally meant to study the massive halo of hydrogen and oxygen that surrounds the Red Planet, which eventually dissipates into open space.
“Seeing it has been just a gift,” Hessa Al Matroushi, the EMM’s science lead at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai, was quoted as saying.
“They’re not easy to catch, and so that’s why seeing them basically right away with EMM was kind of exciting and unexpected,” Justin Deighan, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, told Space.com.
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The probe’s Ultraviolet Spectrometer was originally meant to study the massive halo of hydrogen and oxygen that surrounds the Red Planet, which eventually dissipates into open space.
