Skip to main content

NASA spotted the Red Planet (Mars) Light Up during a massive solar storm.

 

The specks in this image are from charged particles of a solar storm hitting Curiosity's camera, as it captures dust devils and wind gusts on Mars.


Curiosity's navigation camera captured black-and-white streaks and specks caused by energetic particles from a solar storm hitting the image detector.

A recent extreme solar storm not only produced auroras but also provided insights into the radiation future astronauts might face on Mars. With the Sun entering a solar maximum earlier this year, Mars scientists have been expecting significant solar storms. Over the past month, NASA's Mars rovers and orbiters have observed a series of solar flares and coronal mass ejections, leading to Martian auroras. This has offered a unique opportunity to study these events in deep space and assess potential radiation exposure for astronauts.


The most significant event occurred on May 20, with a solar flare estimated to be an X12 based on data from the Solar Orbiter spacecraft. This flare sent X-rays and gamma rays to Mars, followed by charged particles from a coronal mass ejection. Analysts at NASA’s Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office tracked these events and predicted the arrival of charged particles.


If astronauts had been on Mars during this time, they would have received a radiation dose of 8,100 micrograys, equivalent to 30 chest X-rays. This was the highest surge recorded by Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector since the rover's landing 12 years ago.


The purple in this video shows auroras on Mars' nightside, detected by NASA’s MAVEN orbiter’s ultraviolet instrument between May 14 and 20, 2024. The brighter the purple, the more intense the auroras.

RAD’s data will help scientists prepare for the highest radiation levels astronauts might encounter on Mars, potentially using the Martian landscape for protection. “Cliffsides or lava tubes would provide additional shielding for an astronaut from such an event. In Mars orbit or deep space, the dose rate would be significantly more,” said RAD’s principal investigator, Don Hassler of Southwest Research Institute. He anticipates more solar storms due to the Sun's active region.


During the May 20 event, charged particles caused "snow" in Curiosity’s navigation camera images. NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter also faced a brief orientation issue due to solar particles but recovered quickly and continued to collect crucial data. This wasn’t Odyssey’s first encounter with a solar flare; in 2003, an X45 flare damaged its radiation detector.


Auroras Over Mars.


High above Curiosity, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) orbiter captured another effect of the recent solar activity: glowing auroras over the planet. Unlike Earth, which has a robust magnetic field that limits auroras to the poles, Mars lost its internally generated magnetic field in the ancient past. This lack of protection means that energetic particles can create auroras that engulf the entire planet.


During solar events, the Sun releases a wide range of energetic particles. Only the most energetic particles reach the surface to be measured by RAD, while slightly less energetic particles, causing auroras, are detected by MAVEN’s Solar Energetic Particle instrument. This data allows scientists to reconstruct a timeline of the solar particles' impact.


“This was the largest solar energetic particle event that MAVEN has ever seen,” said Christina Lee, MAVEN Space Weather Lead at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. “There have been several solar events in past weeks, so we were seeing wave after wave of particles hitting Mars.”


New Spacecraft to Mars.


The data from NASA’s spacecraft not only aids future missions to Mars but also enriches the information gathered by other heliophysics missions, such as Voyager, Parker Solar Probe, and the forthcoming ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission. 


Scheduled for a late-2024 launch, ESCAPADE’s twin small satellites will orbit Mars to observe space weather from a unique dual perspective, providing more detailed measurements than what MAVEN can currently achieve on its own.


More About the Missions.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

James Webb Space Telescope Opens New Frontiers in the Search for Life Beyond Earth.

  This image illustrates a science-based artist’s impression of K2-18 b, a potentially habitable exoplanet 120 light-years away, orbiting a cool dwarf star in its habitable zone. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is revolutionizing the search for life beyond our solar system, offering humanity its most detailed look yet at distant, potentially habitable worlds. With its extraordinary infrared capabilities, Webb is not only detecting atmospheres on small rocky exoplanets but also probing their chemical makeup in search of biosignatures—clues that could hint at the presence of life. However, scientists caution that context is everything. Atmospheric data alone is not enough to confirm life; understanding a planet’s surface, interior, and broader environment is essential. Even detecting a potential biosignature, such as a gas possibly produced by biological processes, doesn’t equate to discovery. Multiple, independent lines of evidence would be needed to confirm such a find. “F...
Post a Comment
Read more

Webb Telescope Reveals Tangled Rings and Dusty Chaos in Dying Star System NGC 1514.

  NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the most detailed image yet of planetary nebula NGC 1514, revealing clumpy dust rings and clear holes in its vibrant pink core using mid-infrared light. A dying star’s final performance has been brought into sharp focus by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, revealing a cosmic display of tangled rings, drifting dust, and mysterious holes in the planetary nebula NGC 1514. This mesmerizing structure lies about 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus and has been evolving for at least 4,000 years. At the heart of the nebula are two tightly bound stars, orbiting each other every nine years, their light diffracted in Webb’s images like a celestial jewel. While the stars appear as one in mid-infrared light, they are central to the nebula’s complex architecture. One of these stars, once several times the mass of our Sun, ejected its outer layers in a slow, dense stellar wind as it aged. The other star’s close approach may have twi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Astronomers have discovered a 'Death Star' black hole in action.

A team of astronomers has studied 16 supermassive black holes that are firing powerful beams into space, tracking where these beams, or jets, are pointing now and where they were aimed in the past, as reported in our latest press release. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Radio Astronomical Observatory’s (NRAO) Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA), they found that some of the beams have changed directions by large amounts. These two Chandra images show hot gas in the middle of the galaxy cluster Abell 478 (left) and the galaxy group NGC 5044 (right). The center of each image contains one of the sixteen black holes firing beams outwards. Each black hole is located in the center of a galaxy embedded in the hot gas. In the images below, labels and the radio images appear. Ellipses show a pair of cavities in the hot gas for Abell 478 (left), while ellipses indicate two pairs of cavities for NGC 5044 (right). These cavities were carve...
Post a Comment
Read more