Washington: Shining clouds were captured on the Red Planet by NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover.
The atmosphere on Mars is usually thin, dry and cloudy days are rare. And clouds are typically found at the planet’s equator in the coldest time of year, when Mars is the farthest from the Sun in its oval-shaped orbit. But the scientists noticed clouds forming over NASA’s Curiosity rover earlier than expected, one full Martian year ago – two Earth years.
In late January, this year, the team started documenting these “early” clouds. The images show wispy puffs filled with ice crystals that scattered light from the setting Sun, some of them shimmering with colour.
The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam snapped colour images and the iridescent, or “mother of pearl” clouds on March 5, 2021, the 3,048th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.
On March 31, the 3,075th sol or Martian day of the mission, the navigation cameras on the mast of Curiosity also captured black-and-white images: fine, rippling structures of the clouds, just after sunset.
Beside being spectacular displays, such images help scientists understand how clouds form on Mars and why these recent ones are different, NASA said.
Further, the Curiosity team also discovered that the early-arrival clouds are actually at higher altitudes than is typical. Most Martian clouds hover no more than about 37 miles (60 kilometres) in the sky and are composed of water ice. But the clouds Curiosity has imaged are at a higher altitude, where it’s very cold, indicating that they are likely made of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice.
