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Terkini.id, Jakarta – Was there ever water on Mars? This is a question that remains the most persistent mystery in the solar system.
Now, thanks to NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, scientists have gained a richer understanding of the Martian atmosphere, down to the planet’s important functions – and believe they have the answer to this conundrum.
To figure out where Martian water is going, scientists look up – more than 92 miles, or 150 kilometers above the Martian surface, to be exact. What they found is detailed in a new study published last Thursday in the journal Science.
Shane Stone is a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of the new study. Examining a specific part of a planet’s atmosphere, not its surface, is critical for scientists to gain a new understanding of what’s happening to its water, he told Inverse.
“This is the part of the atmosphere where we move from the atmosphere to outer space. This is not a difficult thing, but a smooth transition,” Stone said.
All planets with an atmosphere, including the Earth, have this transition space. Earth is known as the exosphere. This is where a star’s light breaks down neutral molecules into its constituent parts, such as carbon dioxide, into carbon and oxygen.
And it was in this transitional room that Stone’s team found traces of water.
“This is really a surprise and has important implications for understanding the release of water from the planet,” said Stone.
Sand storm
According to the new data, dust storms rising from the surface of Mars appear to have slowly sucked water from the planet for millions of years, dragging water molecules upward on their wild journey through the water. ‘atmosphere.
This also happens on Earth: the evaporating water molecules move upwards until they condense from gas to liquid, becoming clouds full of rain. The place where this process occurs is called the hygro pause.
“On Mars, the hygro pause doesn’t work as efficiently as it should, it’s not as efficient as the terrestrial hygro pause,” Stone said. Consequently, when water moves through the upper atmosphere of Mars, it reacts with molecules in the atmosphere and breaks down into hydrogen and oxygen: according to the study, hydrogen can then escape completely from the Martian atmosphere. – and eventually disappeared forever into space.
This discovery explains the evolution of the red planet from a humid, possibly Earth-like world to the desert world we know today.
Scientists believe that if the surface of Mars were filled with ancient lakes and river beds, the remaining water could be trapped underground.
MARTIAN WEATHER – MAVEN can conduct research during Martian sandstorms. While most other satellites take circular orbits, meaning they see the same part of Mars at the same time, over and over again, MAVEN “continues to sample different conditions on Mars, in terms of time, longitude and latitude”, Calcul said.
Red Planet – the name of the planet Mars, often experiences regional dust storms, but in 2018 the planet was overtaken by global dust storms.
Stone described him as “very lucky” for the team, as he provided unprecedented insight into how the entire planet was responding to storms.
Not everyone refers to the storm of 2018 as “luck”. While MAVEN is busy observing the sky, NASA’s Opportunity rover is patrolling the surface of Mars. A dust storm covers Opportunity’s solar panels, blocking the sunlight and draining its energy, ending the Explorer’s historic journey.
“We were so excited when we had that sandstorm … it crashed and crashed,” Stone said.
Summary: Mars has lost most of its water that was once abundant in space, leaving the planet cold and dry.
In the standard model, the hydrogen molecule produced by water in the lower atmosphere diffuses into the upper atmosphere where it dissociates, resulting in a hydrogen atom, which is lost. Using the mass spectrometer observations of neutral gases and gases in the Martian atmosphere and the volatile evolution of the plane, we show that water is instead transported directly to the upper atmosphere, where it is separated from ions to produce hydrogen atoms. The abundance of water in the upper atmosphere varies seasonally, appearing during the southern summer and flying away during dust storms, including the 2018 global dust storm. We have calculated that water transport dominates the current loss of water. hydrogen atoms in space and influences the evolution of the climate of Mars.
Correction: Previous versions of this article incorrectly indicated the building blocks of carbon dioxide. Sorry for the mistake.
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