Just now, we have our best view yet of the strange alien aurora on Mars.The Hope orbiter of the United Arab Emirates, arrived at Mars earlier this year. It used its ultraviolet camera to capture glowing structures of atomic oxygen high in the Martian night.The UAE Space Agency posted an update on the Hope website, saying that the full set of data from these observations included far and extreme ultraviolet radiations which had never before been seen at Mars.The aurora of Mars is similar to the one seen on Earth, but it's also quite different. It is unique in the fact that Mars's aurora cannot be seen in a visible spectrum to the naked eye. Only instruments capable of seeing across ultraviolet wavelengths have been equipped to see them.(Emirates Mars Mission).They are produced in the same way as Earth's auroras. The solar wind's particles travel through space and enter the Martian atmosphere. They interact with the gas in the upper atmosphere, which is oxygen in Mars's case. The oxygen glows due to the ionization.These ionized particles travel along the magnetic field lines of Earth towards the poles. This is why auroras are more common at higher latitudes.However, Mars's magnetic field was destroyed quite early in its history. Only a few magnetized minerals from the crust remained, so the auroral distribution of Mars is very different.The UAE Space Agency explained that the beacons of light against the nightside disk are highly-structured discrete aurora. This traces out where energetic particles excite atmosphere after being funnelled down by a patchy network crustal magnetic field that originates from Mars minerals.(Emirates Mars Mission).The images may be a new tool to map and understand the loss of Mars's magnetic fields, as we have never before seen such precise, distinct auroral structures in Martian atmosphere.These patches are remnants of the global magnetic field. They can be found in the magnetic minerals of molten rocks that assume the polarity the ambient magnetic field as they cool and solidify.Understanding how and why the global magnetic field lost its strength is essential to understand how Mars became inhospitable for life as we know.Scientists from the UAE plan to publish an analysis of what their observations have revealed and what it could mean for future Mars research.
