Date: 23 Mar 2012
Copyright: Image courtesy of Bertaux, J.-L., et al. (2012)

The OMEGA instrument on Mars Express has detected oxygen emission at the night side of Mars. The emission, at a wavelength of 1.27 µm, was detected on three occasions during a series of 40 observations made by OMEGA above the planet's limb.

The panels above show, from left to right:

• a 2.2° wide swath of the observed limb at night with emission coded in pink;
• the vertical distribution of the intensity observed in megaRayleigh (MR) - integration over azimuth. The red line is a smoothed version of the distribution;
• the integrated observed spectrum, showing emission only at 1.27 µm.