The research will help scientists piece together a better understanding of how Mars evolved from a water-rich, warmer world – one that NASA’s Curiosity rover mission has shown could have supported life – into the arid desert that exists today.
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Mars may once have supported life but is now cold and dry, and scientists said Thursday that a stormy sun likely accelerated the loss of the Red Planet’s atmosphere.
Their findings appear in this week’s Science journal.
New knowledge from the MAVEN have enabled researchers to find out the speed at which the Martian atmosphere at present is dropping fuel to area by way of stripping by the solar wind.
Mars’ atmosphere leaks into space at about a half a pound a second.
That also suggests it was very much involved in changing the early climate of Mars, researchers say.
“Like the theft of a few coins from a cash register every day, the loss becomes significant over time”, said Bruce Jakosky, a professor who worked on the MAVEN project.
Mars once had a strong magnetic field-like Earth does now-produced by a dynamo effect from its interior heat. This discovery has sparked scientists to think that the atmosphere of Mars could be much denser and warmer about billions of years ago. Seventy five percent is lost where the solar wind flows behind Mars called the tail, 25 percent is lost above the Martian poles in a “polar plume”, and a minor loss in a cloud of gas surrounding Mars.
The data from MAVEN provides an answer to a longstanding question about what happened to the large amounts Carbon dioxide and water on Mars.
MAVEN, which stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, launched in 2013 and began orbiting the Red Planet in September 2014.
The focus of the mission is to study different types of radiation that are emitted by the sun and other cosmic sources to determine their impact on the Martian upper atmosphere.
Since Mars does not possess a global magnetic field unlike Earth, the planet has no protection for its atmosphere from space radiation. The charged air particles then rode the magnetic tendrils into space, where they were lost forever.
Solar winds have stripped Mars’ atmosphere bare and the planet is now losing gas, NASA revealed in a news release. But that doesn’t necessarily prove that solar storms stole most of Mars’ atmosphere in the long term, said space physicist Donald Gurnett of the University of Iowa, and Schneider agrees that his team does not yet have “the smoking gun”.
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When solar flares erupt, high-energy particles batter the planets. A CME will move faster than the solar wind and carry even more energy. MAVEN has been operating at Mars for just over a year and will complete its primary science mission on 16 November 2015.
