NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recorded this view of the sun setting at the close of the mission's 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015), from the rover's location in Gale Crater.NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recorded this view of the sun setting at the close of the mission's 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015), from the rover's location in Gale Crater.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
By
Stav is a general assignment staff writer for Newsweek. She received the Newswomen's Club of New York's 2016 Martha Coman Front Page Award for Best New Journalist. She previously interned at Newsday, the San Francisco Chronicle and Dance Magazine and her writing has also appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward, Stanford Magazine, DancePulp, and other publications. Stav is a graduate of Stanford University, where she studied history and dance and helped found the Stanford Arts Review, and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She prefers sunshine and tolerates winters grudgingly.
🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
One planet over from our own, the sunset takes on shades from the opposite end of the color wheel. On the red planet, the fiery oranges that characterize the transition between day and night on Earth are replaced with cool blues, as visible in a series of images from NASA's Curiosity Mars rover released Friday. Curiosity captured these images of a Martian sunset on April 15, the first it has ever taken of the phenomenon in color.
"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," Mark Lemmon, a researcher at Texas A&M University's Atmospheric Sciences department and a member of the Curiosity team, is quoted on NASA's website. "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 sky becomes most tinged in blue near the time of sunset, "when light from the sun passes through a longer path in the atmosphere than it does at mid-day," NASA explains, heightening the effect described by Lemmon.
NASA also released an animation of a sequence of four images captured in just under seven minutes.
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recorded this sequence of views of the sun setting at the close of the mission's 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015). The four images shown in sequence here were...NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recorded this sequence of views of the sun setting at the close of the mission's 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015). The four images shown in sequence here were taken over a span of 6 minutes, 51 seconds.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Humans might one day have the chance to glimpse this kind of view in person, as NASA works toward the first human landing and eventually a sustained human presence on our neighboring planet. The sunset images were released just days after NASA announced its Journey to Mars challenge, in which it asks members of the public to submit detailed ideas for what would be required to create a long-term human presence on Mars.
