About 3 years after NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity initiated its mission on Mars, it sent back an astounding image of a deep blue sunset on the Red Planet as it faded into the Martian horizon.
Why would the Red Planet have a blue sunset? Well, to put it as simply as could be possible, “it is because of the dust.”
Curiosity team member Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University said in a statement, “The colors come from the fact that the very fine dust is the right size so that blue light penetrates the atmosphere slightly more efficiently. When the blue light scatters off the dust, it stays closer to the direction of the sun than light of other colors does. The rest of the sky is yellow to orange, as yellow and red light scatter all over the sky instead of being absorbed or staying close to the sun.”
The tweet posted by Curiosity Rover’s Twitter account after observing the effect had quoted T.S. Eliot:
“Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky”
The same principles which are at work for making the sunset of our planet Earth so vibrant is similar to the events taking place for making Mar’s sunset so blue and intense. NASA explains that the light from a setting sun must pass through the atmosphere on following a longer trajectory that it does during mid-day for it to happen.
The blue color which is visible in the photograph is close but it is not identical to what a person would usually see for a sunset on busy Mars day. NASA says, the MastCam’s lens is “actually a little less sensitive to blue than people are.”
The photographs were sent back had been on April 15, from the rover’s position in the Gale Crater. The images returned to Earth from Curiosity’s MastCam had been actually in black and white but contain coded information that which reveals color when decoded. On Friday, NASA released its own color image sequence.
The sunset sequence of Curiosity follows in the footsteps or to be more precise, tire marks of its older sibling Opportunity, which captured this sunset in 2010.
