"UAE's Hope Mars orbiter spots aurora"

• UAE’s Hope spacecraft, which is orbiting Mars since February this year, has captured images of glowing atmospheric lights in the Red Planet’s night sky, known as discrete auroras.
• UAE Space Agency said that the data gathered by the oribter “include far and extreme ultraviolet auroral emissions which have never been imaged before at Mars.

What are Auroras and what causes an aurora on Earth?

• Auroras are caused when charged particles ejected from the Sun’s surface — called the solar wind — enter the Earth’s atmosphere.
• These particles are harmful, and our planet is protected by the geomagnetic field, which protects life by shielding us from the solar wind.
• However, at the north and south poles, some of these solar wind particles are able to continuously stream down, and interact with different gases in the atmosphere to cause a display of light in the night sky.

• This display, known as an aurora, is seen in the Earth’s high latitude regions, and is active all year round.
• In the northern part of our globe, the polar lights are called aurora borealis and are seen from the US (Alaska), Canada, Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Sweden and Finland.
• In the south, they are called aurora australis or southern lights, and are visible from high latitudes in Antarctica, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand and Australia.

How are Martian auroras different?

• Unlike auroras on Earth, which are seen only near the north and south poles, discrete auroras on Mars are seen all around the planet at night time.

• Unlike Earth, which has a strong magnetic field, the Martian magnetic field has largely died out.
• This is because the molten iron at the interior of the planet– which produces magnetism– has cooled.
• However, the Martian crust, which hardened billions of years ago when the magnetic field still existed, retains some magnetism.
• So, in contrast with Earth, which acts like one single bar magnet, magnetism on Mars is unevenly distributed
• These dispersed fields channel the solar wind to different parts of the Martian atmosphere, creating “discrete” auroras over the entire surface of the planet

What is the Hope orbiter?

• Hope Probe is Arab world’s first mission to Mars, took off from Earth in July last year, and has been orbiting the Red Planet since February.
• The primary objective of the mission is to study Martian weather dynamics.
• By correlating the lower atmosphere and upper atmosphere conditions, the probe will look into how weather changes the escape of hydrogen and oxygen into space.
• It is expected to create the first complete portrait of the planet’s atmosphere.