The Red Planet Has a Green Sky

Scientists discovered Mars has a visible dayglow, making it the only other planet we know of with one besides Earth

An artist’s impression of what the sky might look like on a clear Martian night, using a real picture of the surface of Mars. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ.– E. W. Knutsen)

I’ve recently realized that many of my thoughts revolve around pondering two things — why something is the way it is and wondering what it might be like if it were another way. For instance, like most kids, I wondered why the grass is green and the sky is blue. Then I’d try to imagine what it would be like if it were flipped — if the grass was blue and the sky was green.

Unfortunately for me, visualizing such a scene was admittedly challenging since my visual mind was dim and foggy at best — it still is. But luckily for me, thanks to new research, I can now see what a green sky could look like. Except instead of Earth, it’s the rocky red planet Mars that has a green glow in its skies.

Previous Research

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbits the red planet to study “the Martian atmosphere and climate, the planet’s structure, its mineralogy, and its geology, and to search for traces of water.”

About a decade ago, in 2012, scientists noticed the Mars Express detected a nightglow in infrared wavelengths in Mars’s atmosphere for the first time and published their discovery in the…