The Maven spacecraft, NASA, currently orbiting Mars, found that the Sun probably stripped the red planet than it ever was a thick atmosphere and its water
Huge solar storms were common in the early Solar System. So billions of years ago, these storms would have been enough to end the atmosphere of Mars, the planet of transforming a humid and warm potentially capable of generating microscopic life in a cold, dry desert it is today.
The scientists reported that even now, the solar wind carries about 100 grams of atmospheric gas per second.
These recent discoveries of robotic explorers like Maven are a crucial part of the effort by NASA to send human explorers to Mars in the 2030s just over a month ago, the explorer Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed evidence of salt water dripping from Martian slopes, at least in the summer. The next NASA mission begins in March with the launch of another orbital browser.
Bruce Jakosky, chief scientist of the project, and his team reported that during solar mass expulsions of gas in March, warned space explorer oxygen ions that were thrown higher than expected in the atmosphere. At the same time, flows of fast-moving magnetic activity reached a height of nearly 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) in space.
That led scientists to conclude that the decrease of the atmosphere Mars may have been caused largely by large solar events like this that occurred in the initial stage of the planet.
That atmosphere would probably disappeared in a period of a few hundred million years. Mars no longer has a global magnetic field, but when I took 4,000 million years ago, that would have prevented the loss of atmosphere on a large scale, the researchers said. The strong magnetic field of the Earth contains our own atmosphere, avoiding direct erosion by the solar wind.
The findings were published in the journal Science this week. The issue includes four studies conducted by the aircraft, which has orbited Mars to study its atmosphere for a year.
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