Visible Auroras Spotted on Mars For the First Time

On March 18, 2024, the Sun swung a large bubble of plasma toward the direction of Mars. The eruption of the solar storm led to an auroral display across the Martian sky, which glowed with a greenish hue. A group of scientists used the Perseverance rover to look up at the sky and capture Mars’ visible aurora for the first time. Scientists used Perseverance’s SuperCam spectrometer and Mastcam-Z camera to observe a visible aurora on Mars, identifying the exact spectral line causing the green emission. Although scientists have detected Martian auroras before, they appeared in ultraviolet wavelengths. The new discovery, however, marks the first time an aurora on Mars has appeared in wavelengths visible to the naked eye. “It took three unsuccessful attempts before we got it right, but when we did, it appeared exactly as we had imagined it; as a diffuse green haze, uniform in all directions,” Elise Knutsen, a researcher at the University of Oslo, and lead author of a new paper published tod ... Read full article.