What you can see in these lines is the first global map of temperature on Mars from the EMIRS infrared spectrometer on board the Hope orbiter in the United Arab Emirates, showing the distribution of dust particles and ice clouds while tracking the movement of water vapor and the heat through the atmosphere.
This is the first global snapshot of the atmosphere that we have seen since the Viking mission in the 1970s. EMIRS will acquire about 60 more images like this per week.
Hope
The Emirates Mars mission is being carried out by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in the United Arab Emirates in collaboration with various research institutions, including Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Colorado Boulder.
As EMIRS Development Lead Philip Christensen , a professor at Arizona State University and planetary scientist, explains:
Climate is a global process, so having these global views gives us a powerful new tool to study the dynamics of the Martian atmosphere and how it changes over time.
EMIRS provides the results of measurements of infrared thermal energy emitted from the surface (top row) and from the atmosphere (bottom row). In the right column, EMIRS measurement locations were assigned to the planet, colored by temperature, and overlaid on a shaded relief map from the Mars Orbiter laser altimeter . In the left column, the data between measurements was interpolated, colored by temperature, and overlaid on a shaded relief map from the Mars Orbiter laser altimeter to form a continuous image.
The purple, green and blue tones show that the measurements were taken from the Martian nightside, although the sunrise on the planet can be seen on the right side of the surface temperature image, as shown by the red tones. Features such as Arabia Terra, which has cool nighttime temperatures, can be seen in the upper left of the surface temperature data, represented by shades of blue and purple .
Hope will spend a Martian year (roughly two Earth years) orbiting the red planet gathering crucial science data.