Look: UAE’s Hope Probe discovers new ‘patchy’ Mars proton aurora

Look: UAE’s Hope Probe discovers new ‘patchy’ Mars proton aurora

Dubai: A new type of proton aurora around Mars has been observed by the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), in collaboration with US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the UAE Space Agency announced on Wednesday. A proton aurora can help scientists track water loss from Mars’ atmosphere. “The spatially variable ‘patchy’ proton aurora potentially triggers new insights into unexpected behaviours in the Martian atmosphere,” UAE Space Agency said in a statement. “The EMM team has worked together with NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission to fully characterise these observations. The combination of EMM’s unprecedented global aurora images with MAVEN’s simultaneous local plasma observations opens up new avenues for understanding the drivers of Mars’ enigmatic aurora.” Hessa Al Matroushi, EMM’s Science Lead, said: “Our discovery of these patchy proton aurora adds a new kind of event to the long list of those currently studied by EMM and challenges our existing views of how the proton aurora on Mars’ dayside are formed. “The EMM Hope Probe has so far uncovered many unexpected phenomena that extend our understanding of Mars’ atmospheric and magnetospheric dynamics. These new observations, combined with MAVEN data, have lifted the lid on entirely new possibilities for scientific