NASA wants to search Mars moon for signs of the planet’s atmosphere – BGR

• Mars used to have a thick, strong atmosphere, or at least that is what scientists think they know about the history of the Red Planet.
• Solar winds – the outflow of grains from the Sun – are thought to have blown away the planet’s atmosphere over hundreds of millions or even billions of years.
• New research shows that while most of Mars’ atmosphere was lost to space, some grains may have ended up on the surface of Martian lunar Phobos.

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Today, Mars is a dusty, almost completely dry desert on a planet. There is no familiar life, very little water (mostly in the form of ice trapped near the planet’s poles), and an atmosphere only a small fraction as strong as the Earth’s surface. If we reappear a couple of years later, we may see Mars in a very different light, with a thick atmosphere and perhaps even lakes, rivers, and oceans that may have been supported. bring to life.

Over time, the sun slowly removed Mars’ atmosphere, scientists believe. Most of the atmosphere was lost to the place, but a small part of it may have ended up on the surface of the Martian lunar Phobos. Phobos, which is a long moon, covered with a crater that is only 27 kilometers across at its widest point, may be just the right place if we want to learn more about the history of the Red Planet it orbits.

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As NASA reveals in a new article, Phobos was the subject of a research paper recently published in Geology of nature. In that paper, researchers argue that it may be possible that ions from Mars’ atmosphere were removed from the planet and that, because Phobos was in the right place at the right time, the these ions have to be rooted in the surface material of the neon. -moon moon.

“We knew that Mars lost consciousness in space, and now we know that some of it ended up on Phobos,” Quentin Nénon, lead author of the study, said in a statement. “With a sample from the near side, we would see an archive of the atmosphere of Mars in the past in the thin grain layers, and deeper in the grain we would see the primary composition of Phobos. ”

The researchers made this discovery thanks to data from MAVEN, which is the spacecraft currently orbiting Mars and frequently passing over the planet’s mountains. Using the ultra-sensitive instruments built into MAVEN, the team was able to measure ions that are currently circulating in Phobos. By calculating their mass, the researchers were able to discover that some of the ions orbiting Mars, rather than the Sun, supported the idea that Phobos could record a mass. retention of atmospheric changes on Mars itself.

Of course, to examine this in more detail, a mission must be launched to get a taste of Phobos. With NASA just now preparing to collect samples from Mars itself for Earth reconnaissance, it may be a while before the space group revolves around Phobos sampling.

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