The data shows that solar winds strip away around a quarter of a pound of gas from Mars’s atmosphere every second.
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“Like the theft of a few coins from a cash register every day, the loss becomes significant over time”, Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder and another co-author on one of the papers, said in a statement.
The researchers note that solar storms are thought to have occurred frequently during the early days of the solar system. He says that powerful solar storms, called coronal mass ejections, can multiply the ions’ escape by as much as a factor of 20.
In addition, a series of dramatic solar storms hit Mars’ atmosphere in March 2015, and MAVEN found that the loss was accelerated.
The first scientific results from the MAVEN mission are being published online November 5 in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters. The probe is studying how the planet interacts with solar wind, which are charged particles that stream out from the Sun at about one million miles per hour.
As it is, the MAVEN data show three zones where the atmosphere is leaking away. In addition to STATIC, the other Berkeley instruments are SEP (Solar Energetic Particles), led by Davin Larson; SWEA (Solar Wind Electron Analyzer), led by David Mitchell; and SWIA, led by former SSL scientist Jasper Halekas. On Thursday, researchers presented new findings that hint at how the Red Planet may have gone from a more life-friendly world to the apparent wasteland we see today as almost all of the planet’s air was stripped off into space. Scientists say there are two options: either it escaped into the atmosphere or it is locked in ice beneath the planet’s surface.
As a result of a loss in atmosphere, the vast amounts of water that once covered much of the ancient Martian surface – amounts that could have sustained microbial life – no longer existed in a stable environment that allowed it to exist in a liquid form. Just over a month ago, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed evidence of salt water trickling down Martian slopes, at least in the summer. Jakosky asked during a news briefing.
“And we think that that is the tip of the iceberg so to speak, that early in history the loss rates were much greater and that this mechanism could account for the loss of a very thick early atmosphere”.
Scientists believe Mars once had a global magnetic field like Earth’s that initially shielded the atmosphere from numerous effects of the solar wind.
But something happened 3.7 billion years ago that severely changed the Red Planet’s climate and, over time, left the surface dry, desolate, and frozen – a lifeless shell of its former self.
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That’s roughly the same era when the atmosphere began dramatically thinning and the planet began drying up. During the storm, particles from the sun battered the planet peeling away the atmosphere at a rate of 10 to 20 times higher than normal.
