The atmosphere on Mars is being blown away by solar wind, reveals NASA in the latest update of its MAVEN project
If you’ve ever been annoyed by a gust of wind blowing away your copy of City PM, be thankful you’re not Mars. The red planet is having its atmosphere blown away by solar wind.
In an update today of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution – also known as MAVEN – mission, the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) revealed that Mars’s atmosphere had been transformed from a wet and warm environment, capable of supporting life, to a cold desert by a stream of particles flowing from the sun’s atmosphere, called solar wind.
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.
“Like the theft of a few coins from a cash register every day, the loss becomes significant over time,” said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado. “We've seen that the atmospheric erosion increases significantly during solar storms, so we think the loss rate was much higher billions of years ago when the sun was young and more active.”
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.