1,500 sols on Mars - Selfie
1,500 sols on Mars - Selfie
sol 1500 Selfie assembled from 6 overlapping Watson images
1,500 sols on Mars - Selfie
sol 1500 Selfie assembled from 6 overlapping Watson images
I don't think I've ever seen the horizon on Mars, they always show the rocks and dirt. Does it get a blue sky like earth or is it perpetually that gray colour?
Sky colors are generally weather-dependent, even seasonal in nature. During dust storms (see, for example, the disastrous global storm of 2018) the sky gets darker and muddier. Cloudy days and evenings can add some different colors, and then of course there are the famous pale blue sunsets.
The question of whether Mars gets blue skies has been debated for decades. Personally, aside from the sunsets, I don't see what conditions could produce the blue skies you find on other worlds with much thicker atmospheres; the dust just never completely settles out enough to wash those reddish tones away altogether. The debate will continue, but there's probably only one to settle it - sending humans.
I should add that there are plenty of shots with the horizon included from every landed mission, in case you're curious.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the horizon on Mars, they always show the rocks and dirt. Does it get a blue sky like earth or is it perpetually that gray colour?
Here's a 360 movie (view full screen) that shows the horizon in all its glory, this one was take with the MastCam-Z camera and IIRCit was the rover's first MastCam 360 degree panorama in Jezero crater
Note the daytime colour of the sky :)
https://mastcamz.asu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Mastcam-Z_Sol4_Horizon_Delta_720p.mp4
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the horizon on Mars, they always show the rocks and dirt. Does it get a blue sky like earth or is it perpetually that gray colour?
The colour of the sky varies really depends on the amount of dust in the sky, as well as the time of day, and where the sun is in the sky relative to the camera.
The true colour of Mars is subject to much debate. I believe the colour of the sky when there are moderate levels of suspended dust in the atmosphere is a light butterscotch, but the higher you look in the sky the colour fades a little and the darker it gets as Mars has a really skinny atmosphere. When the rest of the image come down NASA / JPL will publish the full selfie, it may be a 360 degree selfie, if that's the case you'll see different shades of colour depending where the sun was in the sky at the time of day.
We do get blue skies on Mars, but only at sunset. Here on Earth we get reddish sunsets because of the way the light is scattered at sunset. On Mars the suspended dust in the atmosphere scatters light differently, hence Blue sunsets on the Red Planet, and Red sunsets on the Blue Planet. Here's a great comparison that won the APOD some years ago by Damia Bouic, she called it Two Worlds, One Sun.
APOD Explanation: "How different does sunset appear from Mars than from Earth? For comparison, two images of our common star were taken at sunset, one from Earth and one from Mars. These images were scaled to have same angular width and featured here side-by-side. A quick inspection will reveal that the Sun appears slightly smaller from Mars than from Earth. This makes sense since Mars is 50% further from the Sun than Earth. More striking, perhaps, is that the Martian sunset is noticeably bluer near the Sun than the typically orange colors near the setting Sun from Earth. The reason for the blue hues from Mars is not fully understood, but thought to be related to forward scattering properties of Martian dust. The terrestrial sunset was taken in 2012 March from Marseille, France, while the Martian sunset was captured in 2015 by NASA's robotic Curiosity rover from Gale crater on Mars."
IMAGE LINK https://www.db-prods.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/TwoWorlds_OneSun_sunsetboardV2.jpg
Fun fact, our sky isn't actually blue, but it's the reflection of the oceans in the atmosphere that gives us a "blue" sky
Lord Rayleigh disagrees, I'm afraid.
The blue color of the sky is a consequence of three factors:[17]
The strong wavelength dependence of the Rayleigh scattering (λ−4) means that shorter (blue) wavelengths are scattered more strongly than longer (red) wavelengths. This results in the indirect blue and violet light coming from all regions of the sky. The human eye responds to this wavelength combination as if it were a combination of blue and white light.