NASA shares new details about Mars

MAVEN has been examining how solar wind and ultraviolet light strip gas from of the top of the planet’s atmosphere.

Turns out Mars is literally having the life, or at least atmosphere, sucked right out of it. On Thursday NASA announced that solar storms are stripping away Mars’ atmosphere.

“I can’t help but imagine hamburgers flying out of the Martian atmosphere, one per second”, Maven scientist Dave Brain told reporters with a smile.

In fact, researchers believe the thick, protective atmosphere that allowed ancient Mars to be warm and wet billions of years ago may have disappeared far earlier in its history than previously thought. New data from the planet’s atmosphere and MAVEN craft show that solar winds have stripped ions from the red planet’s atmosphere. Solar wind – charged particles from the Sun – have removed gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide from the planet, important elements for understanding the potential for life, according to NASA.

A trio of related papers in Science, along with 44 reports in the journal Geophysical Review Letters, shed more light on MAVEN’s findings, including the discovery that towers of dust are rising from the planet’s surface into space and that the planet has wide temperature variations in its atmosphere.

“Understanding what happened to the Mars atmosphere will inform our knowledge of the dynamics and evolution of any planetary atmosphere”, John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator for the NASA Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement.

In addition, a series of dramatic solar storms hit Mars’ atmosphere in March 2015, and MAVEN found that the loss was accelerated. This causes gas ions in the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere to accelerate and blow away into interplanetary space. “However, where this type of aurora on Earth is driven by magnetism of the poles, the authors suspect that Mars’ aurora may be driven by the remnant magnetic field of the crust, creating a more even and diffuse aurora”, the study said.

NASA scientists have revealed that solar winds transformed Mars into a lifeless desert. According to the scientists, about 75% of the ions that flow away from Mars do so at its tail region, with most of the remaining 25% from the polar plumes.

Joe Grebowsky, project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said that solar-wind erosion is an important mechanism for atmospheric loss, and was critical for significant change in Mars’ climate. Just over a month ago, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed evidence of salt water trickling down Martian slopes, at least in the summer. “We see an environment that was much more able to support liquid water”. “MAVEN also is studying other loss processes – such as loss due to impact of ions or escape of hydrogen atoms – and these will only increase the importance of atmospheric escape”.

The goal of NASA’s MAVEN mission, launched to Mars in November 2013, is to determine how much of the planet’s atmosphere and water have been lost to space. Eons ago, the red planet had a thick atmosphere that boosted rivers and lakes.