Mars MAVEN tagged posts

Mars Mission sheds light on Habitability of distant Planet

An artist's rendition depicts a solar storm hitting Mars and stripping ions from the upper atmosphere. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

An artist’s rendition depicts a solar storm hitting Mars and stripping ions from the upper atmosphere.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

How long might a rocky, Mars-like planet be habitable if it were orbiting a red dwarf star? It’s a complex question but one that NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission can help answer. The MAVEN mission tells us that Mars lost substantial amounts of its atmosphere over time, changing the planet’s habitability,” said David Brain, a MAVEN co-investigator and a professor at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “We can use Mars, a planet that we know a lot about, as a laboratory for studying rocky planets outside our solar system, which we don’t know much about yet.”

At the fall meeti...

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Meteorite tells us that Mars had a Dense Atmosphere 4 billion years ago

The figure shows how surface air pressure changed throughout Martian history. A bar at 4 billion years ago denotes a lower limit shown by this study. Constraints suggested by other studies are also shown by arrows. Credit: Image courtesy of

The figure shows how surface air pressure changed throughout Martian history. A bar at 4 billion years ago denotes a lower limit shown by this study. Constraints suggested by other studies are also shown by arrows. Credit: Image courtesy of

Exploration missions have suggested that Mars once had a warm climate, which sustained oceans on its surface. To keep Mars warm requires a dense atmosphere with a sufficient greenhouse effect, while the present-day Mars has a thin atmosphere whose surface pressure is only 0.006 bar, resulting in the cold climate it has today. It has been a big mystery as to when and how Mars lost its dense atmosphere.

An old meteorite has been known to contain the ancient Martian atmosphere...

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