See a blue sunset on Mars

darkmatterspace2 May 16, 2015 1 min read

The “blue-tinged” sky is caused by fine dust in the atmosphere, according to a statement from Mark Lemmon, a Curiosity team member from Texas A&M University in College Station.

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“The colors come from the fact that the very fine dust is the right size so that blue light penetrates the atmosphere slightly more efficiently,” Lemmon said in the statement. “When the blue light scatters off the dust, it stays closer to the direction of the sun than light of other colors does. The rest of the sky is yellow to orange, as yellow and red light scatter all over the sky instead of being absorbed or staying close to the sun.”

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This is the first sunset captured in color by the rover, according to NASA.

Source: USA TODAY

5 thoughts on “See a blue sunset on Mars”

Ink Pastries says:

May 16, 2015 at 5:10 am

Awesome!

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Manpreet says:

May 16, 2015 at 11:52 am

Lovely!

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Sarah Ferguson says:

May 19, 2015 at 3:59 pm

This is so cool!

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Joseph Nebus says:

May 21, 2015 at 3:39 am

Oh, that is neat.

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rennydiokno2015 says:

June 23, 2015 at 2:30 am

Reblogged this on My Blog News.

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