For the first time, an international team of scientists have predicted that colorful, glowing aurorae can be seen by the naked eye on a terrestrial planet other than Earth — Mars. Visible Martian aurorae were confirmed in March 2015 by the our MAVEN mission, which completed 1,000 orbits around the red planet on April 6, 2015. The Planeterella simulates aurorae using a magnetic field, charged particles and a sphere. For this study, they replaced the terrestrial atmospheric gas with CO2, the major component of the Martian atmosphere, and then created a discharge in a vacuum similar to Mars’ upper atmosphere. Credits: D. Bernard/IPAG — CNRS #mars #space #nasa #aurora #maven #esa #science