The phenomenon took place at the beginning of the planet’s history, billions of years ago, when the sun’s activity was ‘much stronger’; Results are in Science Advances magazine
(NASA) published an article this month revealing an unprecedented discovery about why Mars became arid and lifeless. Previous research on the planet’s soil had already revealed that, billions of years ago, there was water and simple lives on site, such as microbes. But the reason for the water disappeared, making life impossible, was still a mystery. According to the US agency, new discoveries show that a cathodic spraying – a process of shock between electric particles and the atmosphere – was the main factor that led the red planet to lose its water. The phenomenon took place at the beginning of its history, billions of years ago, when the sun’s activity was “much stronger.”
“At the beginning of Mars’s history, his atmosphere lost his next magnetic field, being directly exposed to wind and solar storms,” explains NASA. “As the atmosphere began to wear out, liquid water was no longer stable on the surface and began to escape large -scale into space.” In other words, the atoms present in the atmosphere of Mars began to be eliminated because of the shock against solar electric cargo particles, something like the erosion process caused by ground friction with wind and rain. “It’s like making a cannon ball leap in a pool,” says Shannon Curry, Maven’s lead researcher at the University of Colorado’s atmospheric and space physics laboratory in Boulder, United States, and lead author of the study. “The cannon bullet, in this case, is the heavy ions that collide with the atmosphere very quickly and spread neutral atoms and molecules,” he says.
Observation
As NASA’s publication, although scientists had already found evidence that this cathodic spraying process was occurring, they had never observed directly. “It’s like we found the ashes of a fire. But we wanted to see the fire – in this case, the Cathodic spraying – directly,” said Curry. To observe the phenomenon directly, the team made simultaneous measurements in the “right place and right time” using three instruments aboard the spacecraft maven: a solar wind ion analyzer, a magnetometer and a neutral gas mass spectrometer and ions.
“In addition, the team needed measurements on the day and night side of the planet at low altitudes, which takes years to observe,” the article says. “The combination of data from these instruments has allowed scientists to make a new type of pulverized argon map over solar wind.” Finally, the map revealed the presence of argon at high altitudes at the exact places where the energy particles crashed into the atmosphere and spread the argon, showing the spraying in real time. The researchers also found that this process is occurring four times larger than previously expected and increases during solar storms. The results are in the magazine Science Advances.
