By: Gabby Zhou
On May 20, Mars faced a solar flare, the strongest solar energetic particle event scientists have ever seen up to date. This article will feature three topics: The Solar Flares, Solar Flare Categories, and Auroras on Mars.
The specks in the sequence of images in this video were caused by charged particles from a solar storm that hit a navigation camera of the Curiosity Mars rover on May 20. (Nasa/JPL-Caltech)
The Solar Flares
Recently, the Sun fired off an assortment of rays creating a spectacle on Earth: the Aurora Borealis (otherwise known as Southern or Northern Lights). However, Earth was not the only planet in our solar system that experienced the radiation. On May 20, “Mars was blitzed by a beast of a storm.” (The New York Times, 2024) The massive flare caused X-rays and gamma rays rushing towards Mars as a coronal mass ejection flung charged particles in the direction of Mars. According to Shannon Curry the principal investigator of NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter, or MAVEN, at the University of Colorado, Boulder: “Based on scientific knowledge of atmospheric chemistry, (she and other scientists say,) observers on Mars would have seen a jade-green light show, although no color cameras picked it up on the surface.” (The New York Times, 2024)
Solar Flare Categories
Solar flares have 5 classes based on their X-ray brightness: A, B, C, M, and X. Each class is 10x stronger than the other. Shannon Curry also says that “this was the strongest solar energetic particle event we’ve seen to date.” (The New York Times, 2024) According to CNN Science, 2024, Mars faced the “X12 flare released from the sun (according to data collected by the Solar Orbiter spacecraft currently studying the sun).”
Auroras on Mars
NASA’s Mars rovers captured a phenomenon: “High above Curiosity, NASA’s MAVEN orbiter captured another effect of the recent solar activity: glowing auroras over the planet. The way these auroras occur is different from those seen on Earth.” (Jet Propulsion Laboratory [California Institute of Technology], 2024) Mars lost its internally generated magnetic field in the past, which is why it had no protection against the harmful radiation. When charged particles hit the Martian atmosphere, it results in auroras that engulf the entire planet.