Using its Mast Camera, the Curiosity Rover has snapped stunning images of a blue sunset on the Red Planet. The blue-tinted images show the Sun dipping into the horizon as blue streaks shroud the sky across the evening light

This was the first sunset observed in color by Curiosity. The image comes from the left-eye camera of the rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam). The color has been calibrated and white-balanced to remove camera artifacts. Mastcam sees color very similarly to what human eyes see, although it is actually a little less sensitive to blue than people are.

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Curiosity has been on Mars for almost three years, but this is the first colored image of a sunset it ever took, using the Mast Cam.

According to NASA’s website, the Mastcam is designed to take single-exposure, color snapshots similar to those taken with a consumer digital camera on Earth. In addition, it has multiple filters for taking sets of monochromatic (single-color) images. These images are used to analyze patterns of light absorption in different portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Dust in the Martian atmosphere has fine particles that permit blue light to penetrate the atmosphere more efficiently than longer-wavelength colors. That causes the blue colors in the mixed light coming from the sun to stay closer to sun’s part of the sky, compared to the wider scattering of yellow and red colors. The effect is most pronounced near sunset, when light from the sun passes through a longer path in the atmosphere than it does at mid-day.

TagsNASA's Mars Rover Captures the Red Planet's Blue Sunset, NASA, Mars Rover, Curiosity Rover, Mast Camera, blue sunset, sunset, red planet