Martian atmosphere was stripped by solar wind — NASA announcement

Over the past year, MAVEN has been orbiting Mars gathering masses of data on the planet’s atmosphere, data that has now shown that Mars’s atmosphere has been slowly stripped away by solar winds.

Data, newly collected by NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission, Mars’ atmosphere deteriorates at a faster clip during the stronger solar storms. “Learning what may cause modifications to a planet’s setting from one that would host microbes on the floor to at least one that doesn’t is necessary to know, and is a key query that’s being addressed in NASA’s journey to Mars”.

Those solar winds appear to have played a key role in the transition of the red planet’s climate, from a warm and wet environment that might have supported life, to the cold, dry planet it is today.

Solar winds and storms robbed Mars of a dense atmosphere that could have sustained oceans of water and perhaps even life.

“Wind grabs ions and strips them from the planet”, Bruce Jakosky of NASA’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics said during the announcement.

Scientists stopped short of addressing what might have happened to Mars’ water, but hope the new findings will help to pin down a window of time when Mars was most suitable for life to evolve.

Study says that erosion of red planet atmosphere gets heat-up during solar storms.

Speaking of that trip to Mars, though, Jakosky added that dreams of releasing carbon dioxide sequestered in Mars to aid global warming and terraforming in the future will prove more hard in light of the new findings because Mars’ carbon dioxide is “gone, it’s blown away”. “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”. “As recent discoveries show various shapes on Mars’ surface that have been probably formed by water, we are very curious to see what Mars might have been like before the process changed its face”. “What happened? Mars lost its atmosphere”.

Luckily, the Earth’s magnetic field prevents our own atmosphere being attacked in the same way. Early in the history of the solar system, the sun may have been belching out plenty of CMEs that stripped away Mars’ atmosphere resulting in climate change.

In particular, a series of harsh solar storms, like ones that MAVEN witnessed in March this year, probably sped up the stripping of the atmosphere.