When the sun unleashed a massive solar storm that struck Mars in May, it bathed the Red Planet in auroras, radiation and a stream of charged particles, according to NASA.
The Sun has shown more activity last year as it approaches the peak of its 11-year cycle, called solar maximum, which is expected to occur later this year.
In recent months, there has been an increase in solar activity, such as X-class solar flares, the most powerful solar flares, and coronal mass ejections, or large clouds of ionized gas called plasma and magnetic fields erupting from the Sun’s outer atmosphere.
Solar storms that hit Earth last May caused Colorful aurora dancing in the sky In areas where it is rarely exposed, such as Northern California and Alabama.
The storms originated from a huge cluster of sunspots facing the Earth. Then this group of sunspots orbited toward Earth’s cosmic neighbor: Mars.
Astronomers have used a large number of orbiters orbiting the Red Planet, as well as rovers crossing its surface, to directly capture the effects of a solar storm on Mars, and to better understand the type of radiation levels that the first astronauts on the Red Planet might be exposed to in the future. .
Solar radiation reaches Mars
The most intense storm occurred on May 20, after the X12 flare emitted from the sun, according to data collected by the Solar Orbiter spacecraft currently studying the sun.
The massive explosion sent X-rays and gamma rays towards Mars, and a coronal mass ejection was launched shortly after the explosion, hurling charged particles towards the red planet.
The X-rays and gamma rays traveled at the speed of light and reached Mars first, followed by the charged particles over tens of minutes, according to scientists with the Moon-to-Mars Space Weather Analysis Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The Curiosity rover, which is currently exploring Gale Crater south of the Martian equator, captured black-and-white images using its navigation cameras during the solar storm. NASA indicates that the white, snow-like streaks that can be seen in the images are the result of charged particles colliding with Curiosity’s chambers.
The energy from the solar particles was so powerful that the Mars Odyssey spacecraft’s star chamber, which helps steer the probe as it orbits the planet, temporarily shut down. Fortunately, the spacecraft was able to get its camera back online within an hour. The last time Odyssey experienced such extreme solar behavior was during solar maximum in 2003, when a flare from X45 burned out the orbiter’s radiation detector.
This selfie is made up of 57 images taken by the Mars Curiosity rover at one of its drilling sites in January 2019 (NASA/Caltech-JPL/MSSS)
Meanwhile, Curiosity used its Radiation Assessment Detector, or RAD, to measure the amount of radiation hitting the planet during the storm. An astronaut next to the rover likely experienced radiation levels equivalent to 30 chest X-rays, not fatal but the largest radiation blast the rover’s instrument has measured since landing nearly 12 years ago.
Understanding the peak radiation that astronauts may be exposed to on the Red Planet helps scientists plan to protect crew members who will explore Mars in the future.
“The escarpments or lava tubes would provide additional protection for the astronaut against such an event. In Mars orbit or deep space, the dose rate would be much higher,” said Don Hassler, RAD principal investigator in the Solar System Science and Exploration Division at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in a statement. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this active region of the Sun continues to erupt, which would mean more solar storms on Earth and Mars in the coming weeks.”
Aurora on the Red Planet
The MAVEN orbiter, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, got an aerial view of the aurora dancing in ultraviolet light over Mars during a solar storm. The probe was launched to Mars in 2013 to study how the Red Planet has lost its atmosphere over time and how space weather generated by the Sun interacts with Mars’ upper atmosphere.
But this aurora looks very different from the northern lights, or aurora borealis, and the southern lights, or aurora australis, that occur on Earth.
When energetic particles from coronal mass ejections hit Earth’s magnetic field, they interact with gases in the atmosphere to create different colored lights in the sky, particularly near its poles.
but Mars lost its magnetic field billions of years agoWhich means that the planet has no shield against solar energy particles reaching it. So, when particles collide with Mars’ thin atmosphere, the reaction creates an aurora that envelops the planet.
“Because Mars lacks a global magnetic field, the Martian aurora is not concentrated at the poles as it is on Earth, but instead appears as a diffuse global aurora associated with the ancient magnetized Martian crust,” wrote Deborah Padgett, lead researcher for the Operational Product Generation Subsystem at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Rover Curiosity Blog Of the space agency.
Future astronauts could one day witness these Martian light shows, according to NASA.
By tracking data from multiple Mars missions, scientists were able to observe how a solar storm appears.
“This was the largest solar energetic particle event MAVEN has ever seen,” Christina Lee, MAVEN space weather lead at the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Science Laboratory, said in a statement. “There have been many solar events in recent weeks, so we’ve seen wave after wave of particles hit Mars.”
