New DelhiNASA on Monday released images of a Martian sunset captured last month by the space organization’s Curiosity rover. calling It is the first image of the sun’s rays to be “seen so clearly on Mars”. The Sun’s rays, also known as crepuscular rays from the Latin word for “twilight”, were captured by Curiosity on February 2 as the Sun’s rays lit up one edge of the clouds.
launched in 2011Curiosity previously captured images of nocturnal, or night-glow, clouds in 2021, and last month’s images are part of a follow-up Twilight Cloud survey, which began in January this year and will continue through mid-March. Will continue until, NASA said .
Most of the Martian clouds hover about 60 km above the ground, and are made of water ice. But in the latest images, the clouds appear to be at very high altitudes, hovering in extremely cold temperatures, suggesting the clouds are made of carbon dioxide ice or dry ice, the space organization added.
Commenting on the Curiosity images, Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said, “Where we see iridescence (a rainbow-like sight when exposed to sunlight), it means that cloud particles The sizes are similar to their neighbors in each part of the cloud”.
Lemmon said: “By observing the color transition, we are seeing the particle size change in the cloud. This tells us how the cloud is evolving and how the size of its particles is changing over time.
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what do clouds convey
The study of clouds is important because it gives scientists enough information about the weather. In addition, by observing when and where clouds develop, experts can gain additional information about the composition, temperature, and wind conditions of the atmosphere on Mars.
While the 2021 survey relies heavily on Curiosity’s black-and-white navigation cameras, the latest survey relies heavily on the rover’s color Mast Camera, or Mastcam, built by Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California , informed the NASA release.
The black-and-white images provided scientists with “a detailed look at the structure of a cloud as it moves,” while the color images helped to understand how the cloud’s particles move over time.
On January 27 this year, Curiosity also took pictures of feather-shaped colored clouds.
“Curiosity captured both the sun’s rays and the 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,” NASA he said.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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