Twilight Clouds—on Mars

Dr. Tanya Harrison
3 min readApr 1, 2021

This week, NASA’s Curiosity rover returned a stunning image of martian clouds.

Twilight clouds over “Mont Mercou” as seen by the Right Navigation Camera onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 3072 (March 28, 2021). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Twilight clouds over Mont Mercou in Gale Crater, as seen by the Right Navigation Camera (Navcam) onboard NASA’s Curiosity rover on sol 3072 (March 28, 2021). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Mars is a freezing polar desert. Nearly all of the water there is locked up in ice in the polar caps or surface frost, buried underground, or locked up in the mineral structures within rocks. But some of it exists high in the air as water-ice clouds. The image above shows the latest view of these clouds on Mars, hanging over the Curiosity rover in Gale Crater near dusk on the 3072nd martian day (“sol”) the rover has been on the surface of the Red Planet. These clouds are similar to wispy cirrus clouds on Earth.

This is far from the first time a Mars rover has captured breathtaking views of clouds. Here’s another view from Curiosity back on sol 2410 (May 18, 2019), this time showing noctilucent clouds backlit near sunset:

Noctilucent clouds imaged by Curiosity on May 18, 2019.
Noctilucent clouds imaged by Curiosity on May 18, 2019. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The InSight lander, about 600 km north of Curiosity in a broad, flat area called Elysium Planitia, captured this amazing colour view of clouds passing overhead on sol 145 of its mission (April 25, 2019) at sunset. The dome near the middle of the view is the lander’s seismometer:

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Dr. Tanya Harrison
Dr. Tanya Harrison

Written by Dr. Tanya Harrison

Professional Martian who's worked on rocks and robots on the Red Planet on multiple NASA Mars missions

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