What you can see in these lines is the first global temperature map on Mars from the EMIRS infrared spectrometer aboard the UAE's Hope orbiter, showing the distribution of dust particles and ice clouds while tracking the movement of water vapor and heat through the atmosphere.
This is the first global snapshot of the atmosphere we have seen since the Viking mission of the 1970s. EMIRS will acquire about 60 more images like this per week.
Hope
The Emirates Mars mission is being carried out by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in the United Arab Emirates in collaboration with several research institutions, including Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University and the University of Colorado Boulder.
According to the EMIRS development leader, Philip Christensen, professor at Arizona State University and planetary scientist:
Climate is a global process, so having these global views gives us a powerful new tool to study the dynamics of the Martian atmosphere and how it changes over time.
EMIRS provides the results of measurements of the infrared thermal energy emitted from the surface (top row) and from the atmosphere (bottom row). In the right column, the EMIRS measurement locations were assigned to the planet, se colored by temperature and overlaid on a shaded relief map from the Mars Orbiter laser altimeter. In the left column, data between measurements were interpolated, colorized by temperature, and overlaid on a shaded relief map from the Mars Orbiter laser altimeter to form a continuous image.
The purple, green and blue hues show that the measurements were taken from the Martian night side, although sunrise on the planet can be seen on the right side of the surface temperature image, as shown by the red hues. You can see features like Arabia Terra, which has cold night temperatures, in the upper left of the surface temperature data, represented by the blue and purple shades.
Hope will spend one Martian year (about two Earth years) orbiting the red planet gathering crucial scientific data.
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The news
First temperature map of the red planet, unprecedented since NASA's Viking spacecraft
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.