The Martian rover catches images of clouds on the red planet, and they seem to appear just like the clouds that we see here on earth before the rain.
NASA scientists put together a total of 21 images to make this one. All the images were color corrected to show the rainy clouds after sunset on the Martian planet.
The atmosphere of Mars is found to be thin and dry, hence the occurrence of such clouds on the planet is a pretty rare affair if we compare it with the occurrence of clouds down here on earth. Now the curiosity rover brings us with proof that those chances are really not as thin as assumed, and catches pictures that depict rainy cloud formation on the skies over the red planet. The color-corrected image will aid the scientists in tracking the reasons behind such a rare cloud makeup over Mars.
The new Rover’s navigation and mast camera made possible the capturing of collective images which later were color corrected and transformed to form a picture depicting cloudy weather on Mars.
Clouds can usually be found on the red planet at the coldest time at the planet’s equator, a Martian year ago, scientists caught these cloudy formations earlier than the time they tend to formulate.
Scientists put together a colorful picture that is a striking example of” mother of pearls” clouds, seen in the composite image of five frames put together in harmony.
“If you see a cloud with a shimmery pastel set of colors in it, that’s because the cloud particles are all nearly identical in size,” says Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “That’s usually happening just after the clouds have formed and have all grown at the same rate.”
Further studies will let the scientists determine which clouds are formed of water ice, and which ones are caused by dry ice to learn more about these rare cloud formations on the red planet.
