THE United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Hope Mars Mission has snapped the most detailed pictures yet of the ‘discrete nightside auroras’ of the Red Planet, which scientists have struggled to study for decades. The ultraviolet emissions arise when solar wind runs into magnetic fields that emanate from Mars’s crust. Charged particles then collide with oxygen in the upper atmosphere, causing it to glow, Nature reported.

 

The mission, also called the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), is the first unmanned, interplanetary satellite by the UAE. The auroras was spotted by the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer, or EMUS, which is designed to study the thin, vast halo of hydrogen and oxygen surrounding Mars, not on its magnetism, so the aurora images came as a bonus.