Meteorologists suspect what looks like a rainbow is an arc of dust.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA – Cameras from the Perseverance rover belonging to the American Space Agency (NASA) have captured a ‘rainbow’ on Mars. Whereas there should be, there isn’t rainbow on the Red Planet.
To get rainbows on Earth, you need sunshine and raindrops in the sky. However, the atmosphere Mars which is much drier than the Earth.
That’s why the new images taken by NASA’s Perseverance explorer are so compelling. The rover robot’s Danger Avoidance Camera captured what appeared to be a perfect rainbow over the arid surface of the Red Planet.
Given the lack of rain in the Martian atmosphere, this is definitely not a rainbow. So what is it?
NASA has not explained this. However, meteorologists suspect that it may be a ‘dustbow’ or ‘dust arc’, or the reflection caused by dust instead of water droplets. Futurism, Tuesday (6/4).
Another possibility is that the ‘halo’ never actually appears in the sky, but instead appears as refraction caused by the lens element of the Hazcam Perseverance camera.
In other words, the ‘rainbow’ we see in the image may simply be the result of ‘lens flare’, an artifact caused by stray light rays entering the imaging mechanism and being scattered within the lens.
The NASA team members from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Lab came up with other possibilities. NASA Mars Program Office Chief Scientist Rich Zurek said in an interview in 2015 that ‘icebows’ or ‘halos’ could appear on the Martian horizon. This statement is in response to a question about a possible rainbow on Mars.
This ‘hello’ was previously observed during NASA’s Pathfinder mission in the late 1990s, according to AMA. The spacecraft photographed several clouds over the Martian sky that were thought to be caused by ice particles.
Similar phenomena can appear on other planets as well. According to the blog entry BBC Science Focus written by radio astronomer Alastair Gunn, other planets including Saturn’s moon Titan can also display ‘rainbows’.
Titan has enough liquid methane droplets in its atmosphere to form rain, but a severe lack of direct sunlight would make such a ‘methane arc’ highly unlikely, according to Gunn’s analysis.
On Venus, droplets of sulfuric acid in the planet’s atmosphere can cause a ‘halo’, a pattern exactly like the one photographed by the European Space Agency’s Venus Express in 2011.
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