Sunsets as seen from Earth appeal to many people. However, you may not know it, the sunset but seen from another planet is not as red-orange as we think it is.
Many people love to watch the sunset because of its splendid beauty. However, the sunset will be beautiful in many ways if we admire it in different positions. What if you were sitting on a different planet than Earth, how beautiful would the sunset be? NASA – The American space agency has just helped us in part to answer this riddle by posting videos of this magnificent spectacle on different planets.
NASA’s Sunset Simulator was invented by Geronimo Villanueva, an astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Villanueva had the idea to take this animation while building a computer modeling tool for the future exploration mission of Uranus, the seventh planet in the solar system.
In the video, NASA showed us Sunset as seen from the surface of the Earth, Venus, Mars, Uranus and even Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. When these planets rotate out of illumination from the Sun, i.e. at sunset, the photons are scattered in different directions depending on their energy as well as the types of molecules in the atmosphere. The result is an aurora with extremely spectacular and special colors, in each place there will be a completely different color.
All too familiar with the vibrant red-orange color of sunsets as seen from Earth, but did you know that sunsets on Mars will turn brown to blue due to Martian dust particles dispersing the blue more effectively. On Uranus, sunset is when the light turns royal blue with a hint of turquoise as the atmosphere here is rich in hydrogen, helium, and methane.
Sunset simulations, which are essentially sky simulations, have now found their way into a widely used online tool called the planetary spectrometer, developed by Villanueva and his NASA Goddard colleagues. With this type of transmitter, scientists will be able to record the passage of light through the atmospheres of planets, exoplanets, moons and comets. From this data, they can diagnose what the atmospheres and surfaces of planets are made of.
