Sunsets on Mars are blue
Mars may be known as the Red Planet, but when it comes to sunsets, it's more of a case of the blues - or browns or grays, says a Texas A&M University researcher and veteran NASA camera operator on the distant planet.
"We have known since the 1970s that Martian sunsets tend to be blue, but recent images vividly show Martian sunsets," Lemmon, who currently participates as one of the camera operators on the NASA project, says.
"The combination of dust particles and atmospheric conditions on Mars makes for some unusual sunset colors, but do not yield the spectacular sunsets we sometimes see on Earth.
"The blue color comes from the way Mars' dust scatters light. The blue light is scattered less, and so it stays near the sun in the sky, while red and green are all over the sky. On Earth, blue light is scattered all over by gas molecules, but there are not enough of these on Mars, which has less than 1 percent of Earth's atmosphere, to accomplish this."
Mars may be known as the Red Planet, but when it comes to sunsets, it's more of a case of the blues - or browns or grays, says a Texas A&M University researcher and veteran NASA camera operator on the distant planet.
"We have known since the 1970s that Martian sunsets tend to be blue, but recent images vividly show Martian sunsets," Lemmon, who currently participates as one of the camera operators on the NASA project, says.
"The combination of dust particles and atmospheric conditions on Mars makes for some unusual sunset colors, but do not yield the spectacular sunsets we sometimes see on Earth.
"The blue color comes from the way Mars' dust scatters light. The blue light is scattered less, and so it stays near the sun in the sky, while red and green are all over the sky. On Earth, blue light is scattered all over by gas molecules, but there are not enough of these on Mars, which has less than 1 percent of Earth's atmosphere, to accomplish this."
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