Space physicists from the University of Leicester are part of an international team that has identified the impact of the Sun on Mars’ atmosphere.
Writing in the AGU journal Geophysics Research Letters, the scientists report that Mars is constantly losing part of its atmosphere to space.
The new study shows that pressure from solar wind pulses is a significant contributor to Mars’s atmospheric escape.
The researchers analysed solar wind data and satellite observations that track the flux of heavy ions leaving Mars’s atmosphere. The authors found that Mars’s atmosphere does not drift away at a steady pace; instead, atmospheric escape occurs in bursts.
The researchers related those bursts of atmospheric loss to solar events known as corotating interaction regions (CIRs). CIRs form when regions of fast solar wind encounter slower solar wind, creating a high-pressure pulse. When these CIR pulses pass by Mars, they can drive away particles from Mars’s atmosphere.
Leicester physicists part of team studying impact of solar wind on Mars atmosphere University of Leicester
Unusual Gullies and Channels on Mars
What could have formed these unusual channels? Inside Newton Basin on Mars, numerous narrow channels run from the top down to the floor. The above picture covers a region spanning about 1500 meters across. These and other gullies have been found on Mars in recent high-resolution pictures taken by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor robot spacecraft. Similar channels on Earth are formed by flowing water, but on Mars the temperature is normally too cold and the atmosphere too thin to sustain liquid water. Nevertheless, many scientists hypothesize that liquid groundwater can sometimes surface on Mars, erode gullies and channels, and pool at the bottom before freezing and evaporating. If so, life-sustaining ice and water might exist even today below the Martian surface — water that could potentially support a human mission to Mars. Research into this exciting possibility is sure to continue!
Hidden Glaciers Are Common on Mars
Vast glaciers of ice are common on Mars, but you have to dig below the surface to find them, new radar views from a NASA spacecraft show.
These hidden deposits of buried Martian ice were first confirmed two years ago, but recent scans of the red planet by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are revealing new clues about how the ice may have gotten there.
Scientists think the Mars glaciers may have been left as remnants when regional ice sheets retreated.
“The hypothesis is the whole area was covered with an ice sheet during a different climate period, and when the climate dried out, these deposits remained only where they had been covered by a layer of debris protecting the ice from the atmosphere,” said Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
The ice extends for hundreds of miles, or kilometers, in a mid-latitude region of Mars called Deuteronilus Mensae.
Thick masses of buried ice found on Mars
NASA scientists say they’ve identified thick masses of buried ice in the middle latitudes of Mars and radar mapping suggests the ice is commonplace.
The radar images were provided by the space agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is charting the hidden glaciers and ice-filled valleys that were first confirmed by radar two years ago.
NASA said the subsurface ice deposits extend for hundreds of miles in a region about halfway from the equator to the Martian north pole.
Mining Mars? Where’s the Ore? Discovery
Future Mars prospectors will likely find mineral riches in some unusual settings, say planetary scientists studying the different ways valuable metals might have been concentrated on the red planet.
On Earth, surface waters, ground waters and even chemicals left by living things play major roles in leaching, concentrating and depositing valuable metals and minerals like iron, gold, silver, nickel, copper and many more.
But on Mars there are no oceans or surface waters; no microorganisms either. What’s more, the planet is so cold that even groundwater is frozen as permafrost and functions as little more than another mineral in the ground.
So where does a starving miner look on Mars for usable quantities of ore?
The blue clouds of the red planet Discover
Emil Kraaikamp is one of the more gifted astrophotographers I’ve seen. He has a 25 cm (10″) telescope that he uses to create truly jaw-dropping views of the sky. Want proof? Check this image out: it’s an animation he made of Mars, using observations he made in early December and showing the planet’s rotation over the course of about 45 minutes (a day on Mars is a half hour longer than Earth’s). You can clearly see both the south and north polar ice caps together with several dark surface features on the planet, which in itself is lovely and very cool. But what blew me away is something you may not notice immediately in the picture. Take a look on the left side of the animation. See those three aligned blue spots, with the one blue spot to the lower right? Those are called orographic clouds, formed when moist air is lifted up over an obstacle; the air cools and the moisture condenses, forming clouds. What kind of obstacle on the Martian surface could do that
The Meandering Channels of Mars Astrobiology Magazine
The surface of Mars is littered with channels that appear to be the work of ancient water flows. Indeed, some of these channels meander back and forth like slow-moving streams on our planet. Channels can be carved by lava, wind and glaciers, but these processes can’t explain all the features on Mars.
“We’ve gotten over the hump and can now agree that water flowed on the martian surface in the past,” says Alan Howard of the University of Virginia.
But how much and when is still unclear. Howard believes the meandering channels on Mars may tell us a lot about the wet history of our planetary neighbor.
Howard and a group of researchers will be tromping into the desert and the arctic to find terrestrial “meanders” that might explain their counterparts on Mars.
Mars methane ‘not from meteors’
The methane found on Mars is not brought to the planet by meteor strikes, scientists say.
Meteoritic material subjected to high temperatures did not release enough methane to account for the amount believed to be released on Mars.
The researchers argue that the methane must therefore be created by geologic or chemical processes, or it is a by-product of microbial life.
The work appears in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
The origin of the methane on Mars has remained a mystery since it was first detected in 2004.
Because methane has a limited lifetime in the Martian atmosphere before degrading, some process must be pumping hundreds of tonnes of it into the Martian atmosphere annually to keep it at the levels that have been detected.
The Red Planet was once blue… Giant ocean once covered third of Mars The Daily Mail
A vast ocean once covered a third of Mars, scientists believe.
Such a stunning prospect greatly increases the chances of life having existed on the Red Planet, the fourth from the Sun in our solar system.
Researchers have come to the conclusion after using new software to analyse images of the surface. As a result, they have managed to find dozens of valleys to build up the most detailed map to date. The valleys, first spotted in 1971, were caused by a network of rivers more than twice as extensive as previously mapped. The water channels were in a belt between the equator and mid-southern latitudes.
The experts from Northern Illinois University and Nasa believe they mark the paths of rivers that once flowed from the planet’s southern highlands into a huge ocean in the north.
A Tale of Planetary Woe
Once upon a time — roughly four billion years ago — Mars was warm and wet, much like Earth. Liquid water flowed on the Martian surface in long rivers that emptied into shallow seas. A thick atmosphere blanketed the planet and kept it warm. Living microbes might have even arisen, some scientists believe, starting Mars down the path toward becoming a second life-filled planet next door to our own.
But that’s not how things turned out.
Mars today is bitter cold and bone dry. The rivers and seas are long gone. Its atmosphere is thin and wispy, and if Martian microbes still exist, they’re probably eking out a meager existence somewhere beneath the dusty Martian soil.