NASA Shows How Sunset Looks Like On Other Planets And It's Beautiful

Sunsets on Earth can be breathtakingly beautiful to watch but considering we see them almost everyday, the charm is lost unless it is for a new, scenic location.

What if this location was not to be on Earth at all? What if we watch the sunset, say, from Venus?

NASA

If you have pondered upon this question too, US space agency NASA has come up with an animation that can reveal the answers. NASA sunset simulator, as it is called, has been created by Geronimo Villanueva, a planetary scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Villanueva came up with the animation while building a computer modeling tool for a possible future mission to Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun in our solar system.

The resulting animation is a ¡°lovely palette of colors¡± that would actually be visible to anyone standing on these planets at the time of sunset.

The breathtaking video

Through the video, NASA shows us a glimpse of what a sunset would look like from the surface of Earth, Venus, Mars, Uranus, and even Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. As these cosmic bodies rotate away from the light of the Sun during a sunset, photons get scattered in different directions depending on their energy as well as the types of molecules in the atmosphere.

The result is a spectacular aurora of colours, each one different than the one before. While we are well versed with sunsets on Earth, the ones on other planets are poised to catch our attention more.

A sunset on Mars, for instance, turns from a brownish to blueish colour because of the Martian dust particles which scatter the blue colour more effectively. One on Uranus is ¡°a rich azure that fades into royal blue with hints of turquoise.¡±

The Uranian sunset gets its colours from the interaction of sunlight with the planet¡¯s atmosphere that is rich in hydrogen, helium and methane. These elements absorb the longer-wavelength red portion of the light and scatter the shorter-wavelength blue and green portions.

Sunset on other planets

This artist's concept shows an astronaut on Mars, as viewed through the window of a spacecraft. (Image: NASA/ JPL-Caltech)

The sunset simulation, essentially a sky simulation, has now found its way to a widely used online tool called the Planetary Spectrum Generator, developed by Villanueva and his colleagues at NASA Goddard.

With this generator, scientists replicate the transmission of light through the atmospheres of planets, exoplanets, moons, and comets. They then try to understand what their atmospheres and surfaces are made of.