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When the Sun unleashed an extreme solar storm and hit Mars in May, it engulfed the red planet with auroras and an influx of charged particles and radiation, according to NASA.
The sun has been showing more activity over the past year as it nears 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 Class X flares, the strongest of solar flares, and coronal mass ejections, or large clouds of ionized gas called plasma and magnetic fields that arise from the sun’s outer atmosphere.
Solar storms that reached Earth in May unleashed colorful auroras that danced across the skies of regions that rarely experience them, like Northern California and Alabama.
The storms originated from a huge group of sunspots facing Earth. Then, this sunspot cluster rotated toward Earth’s cosmic neighbor: Mars.
Astronomers have used the plethora of orbiters circling the Red Planet, as well as rovers roaming its surface, to capture the impacts of a solar storm on Mars – and to better understand the kind of radiation levels that the first astronauts on the red planet could suffer. in the future.
The most extreme storm occurred on May 20 after an X12 flare emitted by the sun, according to data collected by the Solar Orbiter space probe currently studying the sun.
The massive flare sent X-rays and gamma rays toward Mars, and a coronal mass ejection quickly triggered in the wake of the flare, shooting charged particles toward the red planet.
The NASA’s Moon to Mars at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The Curiosity rover, currently exploring Gale Crater just south of the Martian equator, took black-and-white images using its navigation cameras during the solar storm. The snow-like white streaks visible in the images are the result of charged particles hitting Curiosity’s cameras, according to NASA.
The energy from the solar particles was so strong that the star camera aboard the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which helps orient the probe as it circles the planet, momentarily shut down. 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 fried the orbiter’s radiation detector.
NASA/Caltech-JPL/MSSS
Fifty-seven images make up this selfie taken by the Curiosity Mars rover at one of its drilling sites in January 2019.
Meanwhile, Curiosity used its Radiation Assessment Detector, or RAD, to measure the amount of radiation hitting the planet during the storm. An astronaut standing next to the rover would have experienced radiation equal to 30 chest X-rays, which is not fatal but is the largest burst of radiation the rover’s instrument has measured since landing nearly 12 years ago. years.
Understanding the peak radiation that astronauts may experience on the Red Planet helps scientists plan how to protect people exploring Mars as a crew in the future.
“Cliffs or lava tubes would provide additional protection to an astronaut against such an event. In Mars orbit or in deep space, the dose rate would be significantly 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 communicated. “I would not be surprised if this active region of the Sun continues to erupt, leading to even more solar storms on Earth and Mars in the coming weeks.”
The MAVEN orbiter, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, had an aerial view of auroras dancing in ultraviolet light above Mars during the solar storm. The orbiter launched to Mars in 2013 to study how the Red Planet lost its atmosphere over time and how space weather generated by the Sun interacts with the Martian upper atmosphere.
But these auroras look very different from the aurora borealis, or aurora borealis, and the aurora australis, or aurora australis, which occur on Earth.
When energetic particles from coronal mass ejections reach Earth’s magnetic field, they interact with gases in the atmosphere to create lights of different colors in the sky, especially near its poles.
But Mars lost its magnetic field billions of years ago, meaning the planet has no shield against incoming energetic solar particles. So when the particles hit Mars’ thin atmosphere, the reaction results in auroras engulfing the planet.
“Given the lack of a global magnetic field on Mars, Martian auroras are not concentrated at the poles as they are on Earth, but rather appear as a ‘global diffuse aurora’ associated with the ancient magnetized crust of Mars,” wrote Deborah Padgett. , manager of the operational product generation subsystem at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on the space agency’s Curiosity rover blog.
Future astronauts may one day be able to witness these Martian light shows, according to NASA.
By tracing data from several Mars missions, scientists were able to observe the unfolding of the solar storm.
“This is the largest solar energy particle event that MAVEN has ever seen,” MAVEN Space Weather Manager Christina Lee of the University of California, Berkeley, Space Science Laboratory said in a statement. “There have been several solar events over the past few weeks, so we’ve seen wave after wave of particles hitting Mars.”