Sunsets on Mars:
NASA's Curiosity rover recently sent back the image of the sun setting in a murky blue sky at the end of the mission's 956th Martian day (or sol) on April 15.
The sunsets on Mars are blue because dust particles on the planet are sized to let blue light through more efficiently than other colors.
Sunsets on earth are usually orange. But in this eerily beautiful image of the Martian surface, the setting sun has a bluish hue. The sunset on planet Mars is blue because it has its fair share of dust storms. This image was taken in between dust storms when some of the fine particles of Martian dust were still in the air. These fine particles are able to disperse light on the left of the VIBGYOR spectrum i.e Blue rather than orange, or in other words, light with a shorter wavelength.
"The colors come from the fact that the very fine dust is the right size so that blue light penetrates the atmosphere slightly more efficiently," Curiosity team member Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University said in a statement. "When the blue light scatters off the dust, it stays closer to the direction of the sun than light of other colors does. The rest of the sky is yellow to orange, as yellow and red light scatter all over the sky instead of being absorbed or staying close to the sun."
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