Curiosity Photographs 16 Minutes of Iridescent CO2 Clouds on Mars

1 articles · Updated · spacedaily.com · Aug 8

NASA’s Curiosity rover recorded 16 minutes of red, green and blue iridescent clouds over Gale Crater on Jan. 17, 2025, capturing frozen carbon dioxide high in the Martian sky after sunset.
At 37 to 50 miles above the surface, the dry-ice clouds stayed sunlit after the ground darkened, and ice crystals near visible-light wavelengths split the light into shifting colors.
Curiosity’s team also tracked separate water-ice clouds moving in the opposite direction at a different altitude, revealing layered cloud systems with different compositions in the same sky.
January 2025 was the fourth Mars year in a row that Curiosity observed the display during early southern fall, turning a striking image into a repeat seasonal pattern scientists can target.
Those repeat observations help refine models of Mars’s temperature structure, climate history and atmospheric loss, extending the science return of a rover still operating nearly 13 years after landing.