SCIENCE LAB SCALES : MARTIAN AURORA

The northern lights are fleeting and fantastical. But Elise Wright Knutsen, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Oslo, has gotten used to them.

'' I'm Norwegian, so the aurora is not a big thing here,'' she said. '' You kind of grow up happening over your head. ''

But catching her first glimpse of the aurora on Mars hit differently. '' I cried a little bit,'' she said.

Mars is known to have auroras - a glow normally produced when energetic particles from the sun strike a planet's atmosphere. But they had been observed only by orbiting spacecraft, and only in ultraviolet - a light wavelength invisible to the naked eye.

But with the help of precise space weather forecasting, NASA's Perseverance rover and some persistence by a team led by Dr. Knutsen, a visible green aurora was spotted on the Red Planet for the very first time, dancing last March above other mountains.

As reported in the journal Science Advances, a violent outburst from the sun on March 15, 2024, was forecast to crash into Mars just three days later.

By commanding Perseverance to look up at just the right time, an explosion of green speckles was recorded on the rover's cameras.

Scientists expected such an aurora, which was long thought to exist, to be spotted by spacecraft studying the Martian atmosphere.

I didn't really expect it to be seen by one of the rovers,'' said James O'Donoghue, an astronomer in Britain who was not involved with the new study.

This Master Science Lab Publishing continues to Part [2]

The World Students Society thanks Robin George Andrews.