Strong solar storms ended the atmosphere of Mars – ABC Color

WASHINGTON. Strong solar storms that hit Mars were the cause of the loss of its atmosphere, forcing the disappearance of water and habitable climate of the Red Planet, scientists revealed today NASA.

“We look for water and found, but if you look at Mars today is a cold, dry, desert planet,” he said at a press conference Michael Meyer , leader of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA.

Currently, the surface of Mars is less than 60 degrees Celsius in average temperature, but at the poles can be reached by Winter least 125 degrees Celsius.

The new findings of Volatile Evolution Mission and Atmospheric Mars (Maven) spacecraft suggests that Mars undergoes the bombardment of solar particles that erode the upper atmosphere to a rate of about ten pounds (4.5 kilos) per second, a factor that is between 10 and 20 times more than usual.

The current Martian atmosphere has only 1% of the density of the Earth.

“What this tells us is that the loss through space has been an important process,” he said Bruce M. Jakosky , Scientific Laboratory Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado and principal investigator of the Maven mission at a press conference. Jakosky compared the process of solar wind that whips Mars to what happens to a person when out of the shower to the breeze and this will removes water from the hair.

“I think that this is the first evidence strong that the escape of gases into space was the main actor of climate change suffered by Mars in the past, “he said.

One of the objectives of more than 125 researchers who are part of the mission NASA is figuring out which gases and how much of them escaped into space from the Martian atmosphere and when that happened.

According to NASA scientists, billions of years ago, Originally, the sun was much more active and unstable and caused numerous solar storms may be the reason Mars, much more exposed than the Earth to these phenomena, happened to be a warm and wet planet to icy desert place and is now.

The Earth has a magnetic field that protects these solar storms, while Mars has no such protection. Also, Maven also recorded ultraviolet auroras in Mars’s atmosphere.

The Maven spacecraft, launched on November 18, 2013 to solve the mystery of how Mars lost most of its atmosphere and your body of water, entered Mars orbit in September and must complete a one-year mission.

Data from Maven try to supplement those provided by the rover Curiosity , which carries on the planet since 2012, and reveal that Mount Sharp on Mars, located inside the crater Gale, could be formed by sediments deposited in the bed of a lake millions of years ago.

In its first twelve months, the robot discovered the ancient bed of the watercourse and collected soil samples and the atmosphere as sufficient for scientists to conclude that there may have been life billions of years ago.

In July 2013, Curiosity completed its investigation in the area known as Bay of Yellowknife and undertook trip heading southwest toward the base of Mount Sharp, where he arrived in September 2014 area.