Curiosity Rover sees God Rays and a Feather in the Martian Sky

Curiosity's team are taking some time to do a twilight cloud survey which as it turns out was a cool idea as at Sunset on the 2nd February Curiosity saw the best example of God Rays yet captured on Mars ,


Previously on 27th January Curiosity captured this spectacular iridescent cloud as the Sun set which looks like a feather hanging in the sky.

Have to say it , that's one of the coolest things I've seen from the rover programs.

"Where we see iridescence, it means a cloud’s particle sizes are identical to their neighbors in each part of the cloud," said Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "By looking at color transitions, we’re seeing particle size changing across the cloud. That tells us about the way the cloud is evolving and how its particles are changing size over time."

Curiosity captured both the sun rays and iridescent clouds as panoramas, each of which was stitched together from 28 images sent to Earth. The images have been processed to emphasize the highlights.
mars.nasa.gov...

Two Worlds One Sun exemplified.

Wait a minute...I thought there was no water on Mars, so no clouds?

a reply to: ancientlight

An explanation and some cloud pictures from the late 90s Pathfinder mission ,

The clouds consist of water ice condensed on reddish dust particles suspended in the atmosphere. Clouds on Mars are sometimes localized and can sometimes cover entire regions, but have not yet been observed to cover the entire planet.
mars.nasa.gov...#:~:text=The%20clouds%20consist%20of%20water,to%20cover%20the%20entire%20planet.

Remember when web pages looked like that ?

SO cool!

Two Worlds One Sun exemplified

Great thought, and stellar OP, gortex.
That's not something you see every day.

a reply to: ancientlight

Liquid water was never found, as far as I know, but both water ice and vapour exist.

originally posted by: ancientlight
Wait a minute...I thought there was no water on Mars, so no clouds?

You're probably kidding, but just to be clear to others, science has never ever said there is no water on Mars. In fact, for decades now it was assumed that Mars once had flowing water, and that a relatively abundant amount of water may still be there -- perhaps underground.

The polar ice caps, which are both water ice and carbon dioxide ice, have been known about for decades. Clouds on Mars have been seen since the 1960s, and water was detected in the atmosphere of Mars, also in the 1960s.

NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers in early 2000s found minerals on Mars (such as gypsum and clays) that could have only be formed in the presence of standing water. So that showed that pools, lakes, or seas of liquid water must have once existed on Mars.

Channels that were thought to be carved by ancient rivers can be seen, which led NASA to send the Perseverance Rover to Jezero Crate because there is what appears to be an ancient river delta that once emptied into it.

a reply to: gortex

Excellent informative thread. Star and Flagged.

a reply to: gortex
Imagine being an astronaut standing there and watching it with your own eyes.

In what appears to be a battle for attention Perseverance rover has sent this cloud picture home ... and it moves.


It's nice Percy , but it's not the feather.