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ELYSIUM PLANITIA, Mars
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The NASA Mars InSight Lander has returned great photos of a sunrise and sunset taken on the red planet last month.
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The space agency said that, like the colorful sunsets on Earth, Martian sunsets would be more intense and bluish on the surface of the planet. This is because the fine dust of Mars makes blue near the sun's part of the sun more visible, NASA said, just as its red soil gives it a dusty red color during the day.
NASA / JPL / Texas A & M / Cornell
On May 19, 2005, NASA's Rover Spirit of Mars Exploration captured this breathtaking view as the sun set under the rim of the Gusev crater on Mars. On this image, the bluish glow in the sky above the sun would be visible to us if we were there, but an artifact of Pancam's infrared imaging capabilities is that with this combination of filters, the redness of the sky more far from the sunset is exaggerated compared to the daytime colors of the Martian sky.
"The colors come from the fact that the very fine dust has the right size, so that the blue light penetrates slightly more effectively into the atmosphere," said Mark Lemmon, a member of the robot's mission team Curiosity, in a press release from NASA.
>> Related: NASA's Mars InSight lander just days away from Red Planet
"When blue light scatters dust, it stays closer to the direction of the sun than the light of other colors. The rest of the sky is yellow to orange, a yellow and red light scattering in the sky instead of being absorbed or staying near the sun, "Lemmon said.
The sunrise and sunset pictures show a sun much smaller than on Earth.
"Because Mars is farther away from the sun than from the Earth, the sun appears only about two-thirds the size we see when we look at sunsets on Earth," he said. NASA in a statement posted on the photos.
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InSight is not the first mission to return sunsets from Mars. The Viking 1 lander from the space agency sent back the first picture of a sunset on the red planet in 1976. Viking 2 captured a sunrise in 1978 at the landing site of the Utopia spacecraft Planitia.
The Spirit rover captured a famous view of the sun being lost under the rim of the Gusev crater on Mars in May 2005. The striking image of the sunset shows a color-corrected blue hue that, according to the NASA, could give a glimpse of what explorers might see one day on Mars.
The Curiosity rover also captured sunrise and sunset views in 2015.
>> Related: NASA: The first person on Mars "likely to be a woman"
The Mars Mars InSight arrived on the planet in November. The $ 850-million mission will study the deep interior of Mars and help scientists understand the formation and early evolution not only of Mars, but of all rocky planets, including the Earth.
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