Look: UAE's Hope Probe discovers huge 'worm-like' aurora on Red Planet

The UAE’s Hope Probe has captured stunning images of a mysterious Martian aurora that the world has never seen before. It appears as a huge ‘worm-like’ aurora that extends halfway around the Red Planet.

The Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) on Wednesday released images of the discovery dubbed ‘sinuous discrete aurora’. The finding not only provides new information but also leads to new questions about the interactions between the planet’s atmosphere, its magnetic fields and the solar wind.

“When we first imaged Mars’ discrete aurora shortly after the Hope Probe’s arrival at Mars in 2021, we knew we had unveiled new potential to make observations never before possible on this scale, and we took the decision to increase our focus on these auroras,” said EMM lead Hessa Al Matroushi.

“We can obtain nearly whole-disk, synoptic snapshots of the atmosphere to investigate atmospheric phenomena and interactions. It means we are seeing discrete auroral effects on a massive scale and in ways we never anticipated.”

The sinuous discrete aurora consists of long, worm-like streaks of energised electron emission in the upper atmosphere. It’s thousands of kilometres long and stretches from the dayside to the nightside of Mars.

It was captured during a solar storm on the planet, resulting in a faster, more turbulent stream of solar wind electrons than usual. These aurora observations are some of the brightest and most extensive yet seen by Hope.

EMM project director Omran Sharaf said having additional bandwidth and resources allowed the team to dig deeper into Mars’ discrete auroras.

“That agility has certainly paid off as we have now opened up whole new avenues of investigation into these transient and dynamic phenomena. Novel science was a core mission objective, and this is certainly novel,” he said.

Hope’s new observations include ‘draped’ magnetic field lines, which don’t touch the nightside atmosphere; ‘closed’ field lines, which connect to the crust at both ends; and ‘open’ field lines, which connect the crust to the solar wind.

These ‘open’ field lines funnel electrons toward the atmosphere in sometimes intricate patterns, which are then reflected in the resulting UV emission detected by the orbiter’s Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS). As they are spatially confined, these emissions are known as “discrete auroras”.

nandini@khaleejtimes.com