09/28/2026
Mars just put on a light show, and NASA's Curiosity rover caught it.
Rainbow-colored clouds, shimmering across the Martian sky. Scientists call them "mother-of-pearl" clouds, and they're rare.
Forget water. These are made of frozen carbon dioxide, basically dry ice, floating roughly 60 to 80 km (37 to 50 miles) above the surface in the 2025 observations.
The color comes from sunlight hitting cloud particles that are almost all the same size. That splits it into pastel reds, greens, blues and purples.
Timing is everything. They glow at twilight, still lit by the Sun after the ground below has gone dark.
And every shade tells researchers how those ice particles grow and change.
Source: NASA / NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
