Are There Rainbows on Mars?
That's a great question.
We Asked a NASA Scientist.
There are water clouds in the thin atmosphere of Mars, so why not rainbows?
You may have even seen an image from the Perseverance rover with an arc across the sky.
That was not a rainbow; it was a lens flare.
We saw that lens flare even in brightly lit laboratory images.
Rainbows, as it turns out, need more than just water, the substance.
In a rainbow, sunlight enters a spherical droplet, reflects off the back and comes back toward you.
Unlike ice, liquid water droplets are made into spheres by the water's surface tension — it pulls itself together.
