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When the sun unleashed an extreme solar storm and hit Mars in May, the red planet was flooded with aurora and an influx of charged particles and radiation, NASA said.
The sun has been showing more activity over the past 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 a spike in solar activity, such as erupt.
Solar storms that reached Earth in May caused colorful auroras to dance in the sky over areas where they rarely occur, such as Northern California and Alabama.
The storms emerged from a huge cluster of sunspots that happened to be pointed toward Earth. Then that sunspot cluster turned toward Earth’s cosmic neighbor: Mars.
Astronomers used the plethora of orbiters orbiting the red planet, as well as rovers cruising its surface, to document the effects of a solar storm on Mars firsthand — and to better understand what kind of radiation levels the first astronauts encountered experience the red planet. in the future.
Solar radiation hits Mars
The most extreme storm occurred on May 20 after an X12 flare released by the sun, according to data collected by the Solar Orbiter spacecraft currently studying the sun.
The massive eruption sent X-rays and gamma rays toward Mars, and a coronal mass ejection quickly released on the heels of the flame, sending charged particles toward the red planet.
The X-rays and gamma rays traveled at the speed of light and reached Mars first, followed by the charged particles within tens of minutes, according to scientists monitoring activity from NASA’s Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office at the Goddard Space Flight Center in the United States States followed. Greenbelt, Maryland.
The Curiosity rover, currently exploring Gale Crater, just south of Mars’ equator, captured black-and-white images during the solar storm using its navigation cameras. White streaks resembling snow that appear in the images are the result of charged particles coming into contact with Curiosity’s cameras, according to NASA.
The energy from the solar particles was so strong that the star camera on board the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which helps orient the probe as it orbits the planet, was temporarily disabled. Fortunately, the spacecraft was able to turn the camera back on within an hour. The last time Odyssey encountered such extreme solar behavior was during the 2003 solar maximum, when an X45 flare burned out the orbiter’s radiation detector.
Meanwhile, Curiosity used its Radiation Assessment Detector, or RAD, to measure the amount of radiation that hit the planet during the storm. An astronaut standing next to the rover would have experienced radiation equivalent to 30 chest X-rays, which is not fatal but is the largest wave of radiation measured by the rover’s instrument since landing nearly 12 years ago.
By understanding the peak radiation astronauts may experience on the red planet, scientists can plan how to protect those heading to Mars on future human explorations.
“Cliffs or lava tubes would provide an astronaut with additional protection against such an event. In orbit around Mars or in deep space, the dose rate would be significantly higher,” Don Hassler, RAD principal investigator at the Solar System Science and Exploration Division of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this active region of the Sun continues to erupt, meaning more solar storms on both Earth and Mars in the coming weeks.”
Auroras on the red planet
The MAVEN orbiter, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutionN, had an aerial view of auroras dancing over Mars in ultraviolet light during the solar storm. The orbiter 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 these auroras look very different from the northern lights, or aurora borealis, and the southern lights, or aurora australis, that occur on Earth.
When the activated particles from coronal mass ejections reach Earth’s magnetic field, they interact with gases in the atmosphere to create different colored lights in the sky, especially near the poles.
But Mars lost its magnetic field billions of years ago, meaning the planet has no shield against incoming high-energy solar particles. So when the particles hit Mars’ thin atmosphere, the reaction results in planet-hugging auroras.
“Given the lack of a global magnetic field on Mars, the auroras on Mars are not concentrated at the poles as on Earth, but instead appear as a ‘globally diffuse aurora’ associated with Mars’ ancient, magnetized crust ,” wrote Deborah Padgett. , Operational Product Generation Subsystem task leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in the space agency’s Curiosity Rover blog.
According to NASA, future astronauts may one day be able to witness these light shows on Mars.
By tracing data from multiple Mars missions, scientists were able to see how the solar storm unfolded.
“This was the largest solar energetic particle event MAVEN has ever seen,” Christina Lee, head of MAVEN Space Weather at the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, said in a statement. “There have been several solar events in recent weeks, so we saw wave after wave of particles hitting Mars.”
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