Last month, Comet Siding Spring spawned several tons of dust and ice particles on the Red Plane. The incident produced an approximately thousands of shooting stars.
Recently, NASA accumulated data from two of its spacecrafts that revealed significant information which gave an insight about the structure of Comet Siding Spring and the atmosphere of Mars.
The data unveiled that the large amount of dust and other fragments changed the entire configuration and released a meteor shower. Later on, the meteor shower gave birth to several atmospheric alterations.
Jim Green, the director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division informed that the scientists were really surprised by the large quantity of particles comet produced.
The magnesium break down the electric charge present in the Martian atmosphere. On the other hand, sodium formed a yellowish shade in the night sky that people usually witness in their parking lots at night.
Moreover, scientist asserted that this is the first time they observed this kind of ionization in the atmosphere because of any comet. It increased the layer of ions in the top most level of atmosphere. Some of the most noteworthy ions were sodium, iron and magnesium.
Nick Schneider, the main instrument scientist of one of the NASA’s satellite stated that it was indeed an amazing sight for the human eye.
The best place to witness this meteor shower was the Martian Surface. However, it was certainly impossible for experts to view the incident from there. Therefore, NASA sent two of its rover over there in order to record this amazing meteor shower. Unfortunately, the rovers failed to document the meteor shower due to some technical fault.