NASA's Perseverance rover has discovered a phenomenon that scientists no longer hoped to ever see on Mars -
“We looked for halos everywhere and on manyimages. And yet, this phenomenon on Mars is difficult to explain. We thought it was a “false alarm.” There’s still a lot of work to be done to figure out what’s really going on,” Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist at the Space Science Institute, a nonprofit research institute in Boulder, told Space.com.
On Earth, ice crystals in the atmosphereUnder the right conditions, they distort sunlight, creating the appearance of a bright spot on either side of the Sun or a halo surrounding it. Scientists believed that a similar optical trick can be observed on other planets. But despite the fact that robotic explorers on the surface of Mars have photographed the sky for decades, scientists have not observed any signs of a solar halo. This was the case until December 2021. Now scientists have studied a snapshot of the halo on Mars.
There is much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Marsmore than water, so the team tested how large a halo dry ice crystals could create. However, the calculations did not match what Perseverance observed.
They also examined whether the camera itself could createa bright ring, but this feature did not match such artifacts in other images. What's more, the strange photo was part of a series of five shots taken by Perseverance in the sky; The sun and halo appeared three times, each time at a different location in the frame. And it certainly was not dust, scientists write.
Now scientists continue to study the images to understand how the solar halo, which is simply impossible on Mars, appeared on the Red Planet.
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