The Prophet Mohammed saw it, the 17th century astronomer Cassini studied it, and now Danish scientists working for NASA say that they have cracked the mystery of ‘false dawn’, and that the Martian dust is leaking into space.
The false dawn phenomenon, also known as ‘zodiac light’, is a light band that appears just after sunset and is at its brightest for people living in the northern hemisphere in March and April. In the southern hemisphere, the effect is most noticeable after sunset in late summer and brightest before sunrise.
Scientists thought it was caused by dust in space coming from asteroids and comets while being illuminated and reflected by the sun. Now, Danish researchers who designed the navigation system on NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter say the dust particles originally came from Mars.
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The team from the Technical University of Denmark designed and placed four cameras to be used to navigate the Juno orbit for its launch in August 2011. The craft has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016.
As he traveled to the gas giant, the orbit went through a dust storm – but now the researchers had a chance to analyze the findings. The dust particles hit Juno violently, but were too small to initially pick up on the cameras.
Professor John Leif Jorgensen, who co-authored a study in the scientific journal Geophysical Research published online on Tuesday, told TV2 that there are so many small objects that it looks like someone has a tablecloth full of breadcrumbs by the window shaken out. His team found at least 23,000 pieces when they analyzed the recordings.
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The team calculated that due to where the material hit Juno during its journey to Jupiter, that dust had to escape from the gravitational field of the red planet.
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