Curiosity Rover Captures Stunning Sun Rays and Iridescent Clouds on Mars

Curiosity Rover Captures Stunning Sun Rays and Iridescent Clouds on Mars

Mars has remained the epitome of interplanetary exploration as it could be the base of future human settlers as countries across the world push for it. But before humans arrive, human-made rovers are exploring this uninhabitable world and it has seen an unbelievable sight.

The Curiosity rover on Mars has for the first time captured the clearest sun rays since the human-made machine arrived on the Red Planet. The view was seen by the rover on February 2 as the Sun descended over the horizon, illuminating a bank of clouds.. These "sun rays" are also known as crepuscular rays, from the Latin word for "twilight."

The image was captured when the Martian rover was conducting the newest twilight cloud survey building on its 2021 observations of noctilucent, or night-shining, clouds. While clouds in Mars are believed to be 60 kilometers above the ground and are composed of water ice, the clouds in the latest images appear to be at a higher altitude, where it's especially cold.

Studying clouds is important since they provide scientists with complex but crucial information for understanding the weather and by looking at when and where clouds form, scientists can learn more about the Martian atmosphere's composition and temperature, and the winds within it.

The rover also captured a set of colorful clouds shaped like a feather on Jan. 27. When illuminated by sunlight, certain types of clouds can create a rainbowlike display called iridescence.

"Where we see iridescence, it means a cloud's particle sizes are identical to their neighbors in each part of the cloud. "By looking at color transitions, we're seeing particle size changing across the cloud. That tells us about the way the cloud is evolving and how its particles are changing size over time," Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist, said in a statement.

Curiosity captured both the sun rays and iridescent clouds as panoramas, each of which was stitched together from 28 images sent to Earth. The images have been processed to emphasize the highlights. The rover had in 2015 recorded a sequence of views of the sun setting from its location in the Gale crater.

Curiosity used its Mast Camera (Mastcam) to record the sunset during an evening of skywatching on April 15, 2015. The imaging was done between dust storms, but some dust remained suspended high in the atmosphere. Sunset observations helped researchers assess the vertical distribution of dust in the atmosphere. "