As a child, I have spent countless hours gawking at the majestic endlessness of space. Literally, an-out-of-this-world kind of feeling sweeps in every time I see a satellite running over my head or the exquisiteness of a milky way.
But in an I-have-never-seen-something-like-this-before kind of expedition, NASA just released some amazing images of Mars and its nightglow.
MAVEN, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution probe took gorgeous pictures of the red planet in UV light. The images beautifully capture the flow of wind and how the rare phenomena covers the planet.
“Nightglow” refers to a phenomenon in which a planet’s sky faintly glows, even without external light. On Mars, this is the result of nitric oxide emissions.
When the sun breaks down the carbon dioxide and nitrogen molecules on the day side of Mars, these emissions are produced; followed by high-altitude winds that circulate the remaining atoms across the planet.
The nightglow has been detected by earlier missions, but MAVEN is the first to capture it.