Mars tagged posts

Dust storms on Mars could one day pose dangers to human astronauts, damaging equipment and burying solar panels. New research gets closer to predicting when extreme weather might erupt on the Red Planet.

Today’s weather report on Mars: Windy with a chance of catastrophic dust storms blotting out the sky.

In a new study, planetary scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have begun to unravel the factors that kick off major dust storms on Mars — weather events that sometimes engulf the entire planet in swirling grit. The team discovered that relatively warm and sunny days may help to trigger them.

Heshani Pieris, lead author of the study, said the findings are a first step toward forecasting extreme weather on M...

Evidence suggests Mars could very well have been teeming with life billions of years ago. Now cold, dry, and stripped of what was once a potentially protective magnetic field, the red planet is a kind of forensic scene for scientists investigating whether Mars was indeed once habitable, and if so, when.

The “when” question in particular has driven researchers in Harvard’s Paleomagnetics Lab in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. A new paper in Nature Communications makes their most compelling case to date that Mars’ life-enabling magnetic field could have survived until about 3.9 billion years ago, compared with previous estimates of 4.1 billion years—so hundreds of millions of years more recently.

The study was led by Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences s...

A new study finds clues lurking in the Red Planet’s soil. The question of whether Mars ever supported life has captivated the imagination of scientists and the public for decades. Central to the discovery is gaining insight into the past climate of Earth’s neighbor: was the planet warm and wet, with seas and rivers much like those found on our own planet? Or was it frigid and icy, and therefore potentially less prone to supporting life as we know it? A new study finds evidence to support the latter by identifying similarities between soils found on Mars and those of Canada’s Newfoundland, a cold subarctic climate.

The study, published July 7th in Communications Earth and Environment, looked for soils...

The structure and function of the kidneys is altered by space flight, with galactic radiation causing permanent damage that would jeopardise any mission to Mars, according to a new study led by researchers from UCL.

The study, published in Nature Communications, is the largest analysis of kidney health in space flight to date and includes the first health dataset for commercial astronauts. It is published as part of a Nature special collection of papers on space and health.

Researchers have known that space flight causes certain health issues since the 1970s, in the years after humans first travelled beyond Earth’s magnetic field, most famously during the first moon landing in 1969...