Unprecedented Event: Mars’ Atmosphere Swells Four Times Normal Size as Solar Wind Stops

SPACE — Mars’ atmosphere, which was once as thick as Earth’s, is slowly being lost because it is leaking into space. Every second, about 0.11 kilograms of Mars’ atmosphere is pushed out of space by the solar wind.

The solar wind is a continuous stream of fast charged particles blown from the sun. The solar wind hits the entire solar system, even beyond Pluto.

But surprisingly, part of the solar wind stopped for two days in December 2022. The loss of wind was dramatic, causing the atmosphere on the side of Mars facing the sun to swell almost four times as much as usual.

The Martian atmosphere, which is usually only 800 km wide, has increased to more than 3,000 km. This strange event was recorded by a NASA orbiter called MAVEN (Mars Atmospheric and Volatile Evolution). The spacecraft has been observing the Martian atmosphere and its response to the sun’s behavior since 2014.

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The MAVEN data shows other aspects of the Martian system, including a teardrop-shaped magnetosphere, a bow shock, and an ionosphere that expands in a similar way. “This was completely beyond our expectations. “This is something we’ve never seen on Mars before,” said Jasper Halekas, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa and member of the MAVEN team on Monday, December 11, 2023.

The unusual finding is the first in nearly a decade of MAVEN orbiting Mars. This occurs after the fast-moving solar wind region takes over the slower solar wind region, leaving a somewhat empty region.

The void storm reaches Mars on December 25, 2022, giving scientists time to see how the Martian atmosphere grows as it should. It also suggests the possibility of good atmospheric growth if Mars orbited a less windy star.

“Nature has set up this perfect science experiment,” Halekas said.

With MAVEN data about unpredictable dynamics on Mars, Halekas and his colleagues studied how extreme solar events affect the planet’s atmosphere. Vice versa, when solar storms do not hit Mars.

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“We can see what’s going on in the physics, how the dynamics work and really understand the details,” said MAVEN team member Skylar Shaver of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder.

Two days after a near-empty solar storm passed over Mars, the atmosphere around the Red Planet returned to its original state. A similar storm hit Earth in 1999, when our planet’s atmosphere increased five times its normal size.

Shannon Curry, principal investigator for the MAVEN mission, suspects that such events were common at the beginning of Mars’ evolution 3 to 4 billion years ago. At that time, the sun was hotter than now, so it could cause storms once a week.

2023-12-13 23:00:00
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