MAVEN has been operating at Mars for just over a year and is about to complete its primary science mission on November 16. About 75 percent of the loss comes from the region “downwind” of Mars where the solar wind sweeps around the planet and tails off into space. Fortunately for the scientists at NASA, the Maven spacecraft was around to catch the effects of a solar storm on March 8, when one struck the Martian surface. That’s the key finding announced at a NASA press conference on Thursday by researchers working on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission.
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According to research published in this week’s issue of Science, MAVEN’s data reveals stronger erosion rates of Mars’ atmosphere during solar storms.
The findings could mean there was big atmospheric loss early in the planet’s history. Maven, about the size of a school bus, was launched from Cape Canaveral in 2013. About $300 million of the project budget has remained in Colorado, CU officials say.
Studies suggest the planet’s thin atmosphere has elements that could support the building blocks of life, but the molecules are swept away by the solar winds because, unlike Earth, Mars lacks a global magnetic field that acts as a radiation shield, said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA.
This wind increases the rate of atmospheric removal by a factor of 10 to 20.
A CME is a huge bubble of excited gas that occasionally billows away from the Sunday. They found the atmosphere eroded much more dramatically during solar storms. Enough CMEs could have swept away most of the Martian atmosphere over time. Last week, he joined scientists from across the country to pitch which spots on the planet they believe are the best for the astronauts to land.
Mars’ northern lights don’t just paint a colorful picture of Earth’s neighbor; they tell a story of what’s required to sustain life among billions of worlds in the galaxy. Brain confirmed that indeed, “today’s Earth is indeed “losing atmospheric particles” but reiterated that our magnetic field protects us – and will continue to do so as long the Earth’s core stays hot enough to produce a magnetic field”.
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“So it begs the question of whether there ever was any life there”, said Jakosky. Interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) may have been a leading cause of the reduction of Mars’ atmosphere to the point it is today – about one percent that of Earth. During that transition, our magnetic field is weaker than usual, making us more vulnerable, but honestly it’s not something to worry about. So what gives on Mars, which has no field? This, researchers say “was likely a major process in changing the Martian climate”. “But it helps us to understand what makes a planet habitable by microbes and what changes a planet’s environment to make it not habitable”.
