Mars is a cold and barren desert today. But scientist thinks that in the past it was warm and wet.
Solar wind and radiation have stripped Mars atmosphere. Transforming Mars from a planet that could have supported life billions of years ago into a frigid desert world.
Recently, NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft found that Mars has slowly lost its argon and other atmospheric gasses. After measuring mars upper atmosphere, Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) also revealed much of the planet’s gas has been lost over time.
Researchers again explained that argon is a noble gas and 65 percent of argon has been ripped away from the Mar’s atmosphere. Argon gas does not react chemically. But it can be removed into space by the process of ‘sputtering’ reported by Phys.Org. This means that ion picked by solar wind slammed into Mars at high speeds and physically knocking away its atmosphere.
Liquid water is essential for life, which is not stable in Mars’ atmosphere because of its extreme coldness and thinness to support it. Now NASA officials said that this discovery is a significant step toward unraveling the mystery of Mars' past environments.
In 2015, a group of scientist had announced that the planet was losing some of the atmospheric gas but now they have estimated how significant the impact really is. The early Sun had far more intense ultraviolet radiation and solar wind, so the atmospheric loss by these processes was likely much greater in Mars' history.
It is too difficult to survive for any life on planet’s atmosphere because the planet dried up and became cold.The researchers analyzed data from MAVEN and they are looking for two different isotopes of argon gas. Based on this process, they did the same for other atmospheric gasses like CO2. After that, they found that from Mars’ CO2 was also lost to space by ‘sputtering’.
According to experts, the new estimates will help them better understand the Martian conditions of the past. It will also help to determine how its habitability has changed.The combined measurements enable a better determination of how much Martian argon has been lost to space over billions of years said by Paul Mahaffy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
