"It Occurred On The Nightside": NASA's MAVEN Orbiter Detects Potential Lightning Strike On Mars

Last year, a team of researchers sifting through Perseverance rover data discovered the first-ever evidence of a lightning strike on the Red Planet. Sifting through audio data from NASA's Mars rover, the team found 55 events over the course of two Martian years (with one Martian year being 687 Earth days), with 16 of these events occurring when Perseverance had close encounters with dust devils. Looking at the data, the team concluded that the dust devils had likely built up enough charge to create lightning inside of them.

"Electrification of airborne dust is a known phenomenon on Earth, caused by charge transfer from collisions and frictional contact between windblown particles," that international team explained in a paper presented at LPSC 2025. 

"The physics of this triboelectric charging is still poorly understood, but experimental observations indicate that large particles tend to be positively charged, while smaller particles tend to be negatively charged. As smaller particles undergo turbulent ascent, larger particles fall to the ground, creating a charge separation that results in the generation of intense electric fields. Such strong electric fields have been observed in both dust storms and dust devils on Earth."

In the new study, scientists discovered further evidence that there really is lightning on Mars. Looking at data from MAVEN, the team reports that they had detected a "whistler wave" on the Red Planet below.

"Another possibility for detecting electric discharges stems from the analysis of accompanying electromagnetic radiation in the extremely low frequency/very low frequency range, which, under favorable conditions, can also penetrate the ionosphere," the team explains in their paper. 

"First established and understood on Earth shortly before the space era, these waves have been successfully used to evidence lightning occurrence and properties on Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. These waves, characterized by a distinct spectral pattern resulting from frequency dispersion in the plasma medium, are known as whistlers."

Looking at over 108,000 observations from the orbiter, the team found a single whistler event, lasting around 0.4 seconds, and with a striking resemblance to whistler waves observed on Earth. The team is unsure whether lightning on the planet is rare, or whether the conditions that allow whistler waves to propagate through the ionosphere are rare.

"It occurred on the nightside, in a region with a nearly vertical magnetic field, which is a necessary condition for the successful wave propagation to higher ionospheric altitudes," the team writes. "We note that while nightside ionospheric conditions were present in about one-third of the analyzed wave snapshots, these high magnetic field inclinations are extremely rare."

"This suggests that although lightning-like electric discharge processes can occur on Mars, the ionospheric properties often preclude the formation of a detectable whistler. In addition, the discharges themselves may be infrequent or weak, possibly due to additional processes hindering breakdown electric field generation," they added.

Though cool, and likely evidence of lightning on another planet found by a spacecraft orbiting that planet, the team was unable to identify where the discharge came from. It is possible that it took place in the atmosphere, though the team believes the most likely explanation is that it took place during a regional storm, or within a dust devil.

Further study on the topic is likely in the works, with electrical discharge possibly being a problem for future rovers and landers on the planet. But nonetheless, it's pretty cool to know that there is likely lightning on Mars, and humanity captured it from orbit.

The study is published in Science.