Have You Ever Seen A "Blue" Sunset?

How cool is this!

The Mars Rover, Curiosity, captured this image of a blue sunset on April 15th of this year.  The cause of the change in color was due to a dust storm that covered the area.  Mark Lemmon, a Curiosity science team member of Texas A&M University had this to say regarding the unusual sunset:

"The colors come from the fact that the very fine dust is the right size so that blue light penetrates the atmosphere slightly more efficiently.  When the blue light scatters off the dust, it stays closer to the direction of the sun than light of other colors does.  The rest of the sky is yellow to orange, as yellow light and red light scatter all over the sky instead of being absorbed or staying close to the sun."

Scientists are using these images to help them better understand how dust is distributed throughout the Martian atmosphere.  Right now, the Curiosity Mars rover is exploring the foothills of Mt. Sharp, which rises 3.4 miles into the sky and is located at the center of Gale's Crater.  Gale's Crater is where the one-ton Curiosity landed back in August of 2012.  Curiosity's mission is to determine whether or not the Red Planet ever supported microbial life, and Gale's Crater seemed to be the perfect choice to explore.  Through it's exploration of the crater, NASA believes that an area near where the rover landed may have once been a potentially habitable lake-and-stream system billions of years ago.  According to Mike Wall, who wrote the article that I read all of this off of, "Mt. Sharp's many rock layers preserve a history of Mars' changing environmental conditions over time, so the observations Curiosity makes as it climbs should reveal insights about how the Red Planet shifted from a relatively warm and wet world long ago to the cold, dry desert world it is today, mission scientists say."

Like I said before, how cool is this!