The mystery was solved by the space administration’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which is seeing an end to its mission on November 16.
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Grunsfeld told media that the most question to know is NASA’s MAVEN mission’s journey to Mars rather than how microbes generate at the surface of the planet.
“Solar-wind erosion is an important mechanism for atmospheric loss, and was important enough to account for significant change in the Martian climate”, Joe Grebowsky, MAVEN project scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in the release. This loss becomes significant over time, and increases significantly during solar storms.
Scientists with NASA’s MAVEN mission were able measure the rate at which Mars’ atmosphere is being stripped away by solar winds.
A series of dramatic solar storms hit the planet in March 2015, and MAVEN found that the loss of ions was accelerated. The findings indicate that the erosion of the Martian atmosphere increases significantly during solar storms.
They’ve found that while Mars may have once supported life, the atmosphere was stripped away by sun activity.
The data showed that during solar storms, Mars’ atmosphere erodes at a much faster pace. In September, Nasa announced that it had discovered salty streaks on Mars, suggesting liquid salty water seeps seasonally to the surface. The magnetic field of the solar wind produces an electric field that interacts with the atmosphere of Mars as it passes by. “Mars was clearly very warm and wet, with 100 times more atmosphere”.
The goal of the MAVEN mission is to study what types of radiation are coming from the sun and cosmic sources and the impact on gases in Mars’ upper atmosphere. This discovery has sparked scientists to think that the atmosphere of Mars could be much denser and warmer about billions of years ago.
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Made up mainly of protons and electrons, solar wind travels from the sun’s atmosphere at speeds around 1 million miles per hour. The press conference accompanies a set of research papers published today in Science Magazine and Geophysical Research Letters, including one on the presence of auroras or northern lights on the red planet. The other factor that protects our planet from turning into a dead, frozen hellscape is our Earth’s rocking magnetic field that shields us from the brunt of the solar wind’s wrath. Mars also lacks a strong global magnetic field which allows charged atmospheric particles to be carried into space.
