On a cold March night in 2024, the Martian sky lit up—and NASA’s Perseverance rover caught it on camera. What it saw made history: the first visible-light auroras ever recorded from the surface of another planet.
The event wasn’t a fluke. A solar storm had been brewing. The Sun launched a massive coronal mass ejection, or CME, a magnetic and gas explosion on March 15. As it broke across the solar system, it crashed into Mars. The impact set off a night-sky spectacle no human eye has ever seen on the Red Planet.
Auroras. But not just the kind scientists had seen before.
“This exciting discovery opens up new possibilities for auroral research and confirms that auroras could be visible to future astronauts on Mars’ surface,” said Elise Knutsen, a researcher at the University of Oslo and lead author of the study published in Science Advances.
Auroras Without a Magnetic Field?
Earth’s northern and southern lights are shaped by its global magnetic field. Solar particles get funneled toward the poles and light up the upper atmosphere. Green is the most common color, produced when oxygen atoms glow at a very specific wavelength: 557.7 nanometers.
Mars doesn’t have a global magnetic field. That changes everything. Its auroras work differently.
NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft first spotted what are known as SEP auroras—short for solar energetic particles—back in 2014. These don’t rely on magnetic funnels. They happen when high-energy solar particles smash directly into the Martian atmosphere. That impact causes widespread glow, not just near the poles.
But those earlier sightings? They were in ultraviolet, captured from orbit.
What happened in March was different. For the first time, Perseverance saw SEP auroras in visible green light, and it did so from the ground.
Watching and Waiting for a Solar Storm
Knutsen and her team had been waiting for a chance like this. They knew solar maximum was approaching, a phase in the Sun’s 11-year cycle when solar flares and CMEs become more common. That meant more SEP activity at Mars. More chance of a visible aurora.
But timing it was tricky. They needed to aim the rover’s instruments, its SuperCam spectrometer and Mastcam-Z camera, just right. And they needed a strong CME.
“The trick was to pick a good CME, one that would accelerate and inject many charged particles into Mars’ atmosphere,” Knutsen said.
NASA’s Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office and the Community Coordinated Modeling Center, both based at Goddard Space Flight Center, played a key role. They monitor space weather and run simulations to predict whether CMEs might hit Mars. When one looked promising, they sent out alerts.
The Right Storm at the Right Time
Christina Lee, a space physicist at UC Berkeley and part of the MAVEN team, received one of those alerts. It was about the March 15 event.
“There was a notable solar storm heading toward the Red Planet, which could arrive in a few days,” she said.
Lee issued a Mars Space Weather Alert. That gave the rover team time to prepare.
Knutsen’s team reviewed the forecast. The numbers looked good. If they were right, the CME would trigger SEP activity strong enough to produce a visible glow.
“When we saw the strength of this one, we estimated it could trigger aurora bright enough for our instruments to detect,” Knutsen said.
Then, a Green Glow in the Sky
The CME struck. A few days later, Perseverance saw it: a faint green light, nearly uniform across the sky. And it arrived at precisely 557.7 nanometers, the same wavelength as Earth’s green auroras.
To verify what they were witnessing, the team relied on MAVEN’s SEP instrument The data matched. So did readings from ESA’s Mars Express orbiter. All signs pointed to the same thing: Perseverance had captured a Martian aurora in visible light.
“This was a fantastic example of cross-mission coordination,” said Shannon Curry, MAVEN’s principal investigator. “We all worked together quickly to facilitate this observation and are thrilled to have finally gotten a sneak peek of what astronauts will be able to see there some day.”
What This Means for Mars Exploration
The green light captured on Mars isn’t just a scientific milestone, it’s a preview of what future explorers might witness with their own eyes.
“Perseverance’s observations of the visible-light aurora confirm a new way to study these phenomena that’s complementary to what we can observe with our Mars orbiters,” said Katie Stack Morgan, acting project scientist for the rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Studying how auroras form on Mars, without the shield of a magnetic field, can also help scientists understand how solar radiation affects the planet. That’s critical for planning crewed missions.
Behind the Missions
Perseverance is part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission. Built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and managed by Caltech, it’s central to NASA’s Moon to Mars program, which also includes the Artemis missions.
MAVEN launched in 2013 to study Mars’ upper atmosphere. It’s operated by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, with support from NASA Goddard and Lockheed Martin Space.
Together, these missions captured something no one had seen before, a quiet ripple of green light in the skies above Jezero Crater. A sign that Mars, despite its cold and dry surface, still has a few surprises left.
