NASA reveals new exciting information about Mars

“Solar-wind erosion is an important mechanism for atmospheric loss and was important enough to account for significant change in the Martian climate”, noted Joe Grebowsky, MAVEN project scientist.

Solar winds have stripped Mars’ atmosphere bare and the planet is now losing gas, NASA revealed in a news release.

A powerful solar ejection on March 8 also gave NASA the chance to capture stunning data, which shows the escape rate of atmosphere during solar storms is about 10 to 100 times normal rates, according to the study.

The findings reveal that the erosion of Mars’ atmosphere will increase considerably throughout solar storms.

Not only does the research add to our understanding of Mars’ past, it enlightens us as to how the sun could be affecting our own atmosphere and provides us with information relevant to a future manned mission to our neighboring planet.

Mars’s upper atmosphere was exposed to the solar wind.

Water might be present on Mars right now, but billions of years ago the Red Planet was a very, very different place to the barren wasteland it is now.

The difference between Earth and Mars however is Earth’s strong global magnetic field, which shields it from the solar wind.

Also, because Mars has been robbed of its atmosphere and is located far away from the Sun, it has become much colder than the Earth – with an average temperature of -60 degree Celcius, which drops further to -125 degree Celcius in winters around the poles.

According to Jakosky, the current solar wind stripping activity on Mars is enough to deplete an atmosphere over billions of years. As it flows past Mars it can generate an electric field, which accelerates electrically-charged atoms (ions) in the upper atmosphere, and shoots them into space.

The researchers came to this conclusion thanks to data collected by the MAVEN probe, launched in 2013 to study the atmosphere of Mars.

These particles stream up from the sun at over 1.5 million kilometres an hour, impacting all planets in the solar system. There was liquid water along with warm temperatures that would have made the planet pretty suitable for life. The findings were published in the November issues of the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters.

But, at an event at NASA headquarters in Washington, researchers assured the audience that a similar fate was unlikely to befall planet Earth, thanks in part to our larger magnetic field.