NASA spots spectacular 'dragon aurora' on Mars, camera team releases pictures

A team behind the HiRise camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shared a unique image of Mars in which they discovered a spectacular dragon aurora on the planet’s canyon. Taking to its official handle on Twitter, the team wrote that the image of light-toned blocky material in southwestern Melas Chasma resembled a fabled Chinese dragon when seen from a different perspective. According to NASA, the natural phenomenon of creation auroras is caused by particles emanating from the Sun that collide with Earth's atmosphere that results in a unique light formation, the space agency wrote on its website.

The HiRise camera team highlighted a series of miniature dents for valleys at the bottom the aurora and explained on its website named lunar and planetary Laboratory saying, “Several of the light-toned deposits are seen only in the valleys, suggesting they were either deposited or are exposed by erosion.” It further added, “Small valleys can be seen along the wallrock to the south. The wallrock is a mixture of two geologic units that differ mainly in their reflectance”. 

MRO's camera had captured a similar dragon-like aurora in Iceland in 2019. "Have you ever seen a dragon in the sky? Although real flying dragons don’t exist, a huge dragon-shaped aurora developed in the sky over Iceland earlier this month," the space agency NASA had written in a social media post.

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Saturn's aurora

Earlier, NASA discovered a unique brand of the aurora that lights up the polar cap of the planet Saturn, unlike any other known in the solar system. The odd aurora was captured on one of the infrared instruments on NASA's Cassini spacecraft. "We've never seen an aurora-like this elsewhere," said Tom Stallard, a scientist working with Cassini data at the University of Leicester, England, said in a statement released on NASA official website. "It's not just a ring of auroras like those we've seen at Jupiter or Earth. This aurora covers an enormous area across the pole. Our current ideas on what forms Saturn's aurora predict that this region should be empty, so finding such a bright aurora here is a fantastic surprise," he was quoted as saying in the statement. 

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