Vintage Post (292): Blue and red, red and blue
Vintage Post (292): Blue and red, red and blue
What makes the sunrise and sunset of Earth and Mars so different?
Recently Curiosity He amazed us again, this time photographing the Martian sunset. It is not the first time he does it, nor the first probe or rover that offers us something similar (Spirit, Opportunity Y Phoenix they already achieved it at the time), but being the best shots achieved by the vehicle with the best cameras sent to the surface of the planet, its quality goes beyond anything seen so far. And in them he offered us a beautiful, almost magical vision of the sunset lights spreading through Gale, while the Sun slowly disappeared behind the horizon. A familiar scene, but at the same time with notable differences that reminded us that we were in another world. And the question is inevitable: What is the reason for these differences? Why does it have an opposite color palette? How would it look if we were on the surface? We found the answer, how could it be otherwise, in its atmosphere, tenuous and full of dust, and its greater distance from the Sun.To begin with, the Sun only illuminates Mars with the equivalent of what would be a very cloudy afternoon in the earth, since the distance that separates it from our star is much greater.
Not only that, but the solar disk is reduced its apparent size from 0.5 ° (the equivalent of a Moon full) to which we are accustomed up to 0.35 ° in Mars. As a result, the glow of the sunset is less and less bright.
What's up with the color? In the land dust and other fine particles in the atmosphere disperse the blues and greens of Sun nascent (or west) to color it yellow, orange and red. When these are reflected in the clouds, the colors are amplified and spread across the sky, giving rise to spectacular explosions of light and color of overwhelming beauty.
Things are a little different in Mars. The omnipresent fine dust in the Martian atmosphere absorbs the blue light and disperses the warmer colors, coloring the sky that is far from the Sun with the already familiar reddish hue. At the same time, dust particles located just in their direction from the point of view of the observer, scatter the blue light, creating an aura of said color around them, although only when it is close to the horizon, the moment when its light it goes through a greater amount of atmosphere and dust.
In the land, the blue light of Sun it is dispersed by air molecules and spreads throughout the sky, endowing it with this characteristic color. But Mars It has less than 1% of the Earth's atmosphere, so this effect only manifests itself precisely at sunset, when greater is the amount of air it must pass through. Although it is still a distant echo of what could one day be.
Nor does it exist in Mars the "deforming" effect that we see in the terrestrial sunrise or sunset, with the atmospheric refraction crushing the image of the Sun just when it is on the horizon, as if it were a melon. The air, simply, is too thin to produce that effect, unless it is perceptible by the cameras of the various probes and rovers that have landed on the red planet.
But not everything is less in Mars, since the continuous presence of dust in suspension in the highest layers of the atmosphere, driven by the continuous storms that run along the surface, would continue to reflect sunlight well beyond its disappearance behind the horizon, extending the lights of the sunset for 2 hours, maybe even more. For future human explorers, not to mention the first to settle permanently on the red planet, the spectacle, although less dazzling, will last much longer.
These are the Martian sunsets, they remind us of the land, but at the same time we are strangers. And each of them, on one planet and another, has its own beauty.
Sunset in Gale. A sun smaller than what we see on Earth, surrounded by a halo of blue light while the reddish tones cover the rest of the sky.
On Earth the Sun seems to deform when it is close to the horizon because of atmospheric distortion. On Mars, at least as far as the images go, the atmosphere, barely 1% thick, is not capable of generating this effect.
On Earth the atmosphere disperses the blue light, giving our sky its characteristic color, while at the same time giving the sunset its reddish tones. The situation on Mars is somewhat different, as we can see.
Another example of Martian sunset, in this case observed by the now legendary Opportunity.What Makes Mars Sunsets Different from Earth's?
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