What was the Mars solar storm like?
A series of solar storms shook the large red planet, Mars, with intense X and gamma rays, triggering phenomena such as the Martian auroras. The most notable event occurred on May 20, with a solar flare classified as X12, one of the most powerful of its kind.
The first signs of this storm were detected by the Solar Orbiter probea collaboration between THAT and the POT. X-rays and gamma rays arrived first, followed by charged particles from the sun that took a few tens of minutes to reach Mars. The orbiter NASA’s Mars Odyssey 2001 was also affected, with its stellar chamber flooded by solar particles, causing a brief blackout.
This wasn’t the first time the Odyssey faced a solar storm; In 2003, a similar eruption, classified as X45, damaged its radiation detector designed for such events.
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For its part, the orbiter NASA MAVEN captured another effect of this solar activity: the appearance of bright auroras on Marsconsequence of the lack of a magnetic field that protects the planet from these solar particles. “This was the largest solar energetic particle event observed by MAVEN,” said Christina Lee, space weather manager for the probe, from the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
