We skipped #MarsMonday this week to honor Memorial Day, so we're sharing one today. Auroras on Mars... So, we have blue sunsets on the Red Planet, and occasionally, green skies. While NASA's #Orion spacecraft was taking its first flight in December 2014, NASA's #MAVEN spacecraft detected evidence of widespread auroras in Mars's northern hemisphere. The "Christmas Lights," as researchers called them, circled the globe and descended so close to the Martian equator that, if the lights had occurred on Earth, they would have been over places like #Florida and #Texas. "It really is amazing," says Nick Schneider who leads MAVEN's Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) instrument team at the University of Colorado. "Auroras on Mars appear to be more wide ranging than we ever imagined.” This isn't the first time a spacecraft has detected auroras on Mars. Ten years ago, the European Space Agency's Mars Express found an ultraviolet glow coming from "magnetic umbrellas" in the southern hemispher...