NASA Rover Spotted the First Visible Aurora on Mars

In March 2024, the Sun fired off a huge coronal mass ejection, flinging a cloud of plasma straight in Mars’ direction. Mars took the full blast, and its skies lit up with a hazy green light. And for the first time, NASA scientists captured a visible aurora glowing across the Martian sky.

The team behind the breakthrough, led by Elise Knutsen of the University of Oslo, used NASA’s Perseverance rover to pull off this photo shoot. They rigged up the rover’s SuperCam spectrometer and Mastcam-Z camera, patiently waiting for the right moment to catch the Martian light show. They failed three times but nailed it on the fourth attempt. They captured a ghostly green haze stretching across the Martian sky.

Auroras happen when solar particles collide with a planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field. They happen all the time here on Earth, and with such regularity that you can build an entire vacation around it. On Mars, though, it’s a little more complicated.

Mars has no global magnetic field. Just scattered patches of magnetism in its crust. That makes Martian auroras harder to track and even tougher to see. Past observations detected them only in the ultraviolet spectrum. This time, scientists spotted the aurora in visible light, making it visible to the human eye.

Knutsen’s team leaned on NASA’s Community Coordinated Modeling Center to predict when and where the aurora might strike. After some fiddling with the rover’s settings and running simulations to nail the timing, they were able to time it out just right. The findings, published in Science Advances, prove that not only can auroras happen on Mars, but they can be predicted and photographed.

This green Martian glow isn’t just eye candy that future Mars colonists and tourists can gawk at. More importantly, it represents invaluable scientific data. These light displays help researchers understand how solar particles interact with Mars’ thin atmosphere and fractured magnetic field. It helps us better understand how the sun impacts and shapes the planets that revolve around it.

It’s also very pretty, and it’s fine to just appreciate it on that level, too. Elise Knutsen did. Speaking to the New York Times, the Norwegian researcher who grew up with the auroras over her head admitted she “cried a little bit” when glimpsing the auroras over Mars.