MAVEN, however, was not designed to study Phobos; it was designed to collect data on the Martian atmosphere and its loss to space… a continuous investigation that would provide data on the ions present each of the five times every Earth-day MAVEN passed Phobos’ orbit.
Maven was not designed for a lot of what it is doing but its getting it done...
While the MAVEN spacecraft is designed for its primary scientific mission, it also serves a secondary and vital role as part of a communications relay network in Martian orbit for spacecraft trying to call home to Earth — an element it will put into practice this week for the United Arab Emirates’s Al-Amal probe’s arrival.
That report of lost water is an argument for covering the surface of Mars with a thin layer of material to stop dust storms.
That has been proposed in this forum in the past.
Graphene is a candidate material for the job ... it is (apparently) the most efficient possible way to use Carbon to cut down on dust activity on Mars.
(th)
]]>Orbiting satelite Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft has discovered that water vapor near the surface of the Red Planet is lofted higher into the atmosphere than anyone expected was possible.
The researchers measured 20 times more water than usual over two days in June 2018, when a severe global dust storm enveloped Mars (the one that put NASA’s Opportunity rover out of commission). The one in 2018 killed off NASA's Opportunity rover by coating its solar panels in dust. Stone and his colleagues estimated Mars lost as much water in 45 days during this storm as it typically does throughout an entire Martian year, which lasts two Earth years.
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Well he does exist. last visited 2018-01-12 17:29:30 a lot has changed since you took up you present scientific hat and thank you that payload of articles to read.
Mars still has secrets to be had and we need man there with these tools to find them quicker.
Hi, SpaceNut! Glad to see you're still around here.
I've been keeping myself busy doing Mars science, but with the SpaceX launch coming up this week I was reminded of this forum and thought I'd pop in and see what's up.
]]>Mars still has secrets to be had and we need man there with these tools to find them quicker.
]]>You can read the discovery paper in Nature Astronomy here:
Deighan, et al. Discovery of a proton aurora at Mars. Nat Astron 2, 802–807 (2018).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0538-5
A less formal 'behind-the-scenes' blog post with some nice illustrations and the paper's main figures here:
A New Type of Aurora at Mars
https://go.nature.com/2LI1rjt
NASA press release here:
NASA’s MAVEN Spacecraft Finds That “Stolen” Electrons Enable Unusual Aurora on Mars
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/godd … ton-aurora
And a very nice statistical follow-up study by a grad student at Embry-Riddle:
Hughes, et al. Proton Aurora on Mars: A Dayside Phenomenon Pervasive in Southern Summer. JGR, 124, 12 (2019).
https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JA027140
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Mehdi Benna and his colleagues proposed to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) project team that they remotely reprogram the MAVEN spacecraft and its Natural Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) instrument to do a unique experiment.
"The refreshing thing is that the patterns that we observed in the upper atmosphere match globally what one would predict from models," says Benna. "The physics works." One surprise came when the team analyzed the shorter-term variability of winds in the upper atmosphere, which was greater than anticipated. "On Mars, the average circulation is steady, but if you take a snapshot at any given time, the winds are highly variable," Benna says. More work is needed to determine why these contrasting patterns exist.
A second surprise was that the wind hundreds of kilometers above the planet's surface still contained information about landforms below, like mountains, canyons, and basins. As the air mass flows over those features, "it creates waves - ripple effects - that flow up to the upper atmosphere" and can be detected by MAVEN and NGIMS, Benna explains. "On Earth, we see the same kind of waves, but not at such high altitudes. That was the big surprise, that these can go up to 280 kilometers high."
This tells me that wind mills carefully placed will work on mars....
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Here is another, and I will speak about my feelings about Mars and Venus as well.
https://dailygalaxy.com/2019/02/water-o … ture-base/
Quote:
“Water on the Moon” –NASA Scientists Find Natural Source for Future Base
Posted on Feb 21, 2019“We think of water as this special, magical compound,” said William M. Farrell, a plasma physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who helped develop the simulation. “But here’s what’s amazing: every rock has the potential to make water, especially after being irradiated by the solar wind.”
When a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind careens onto the Moon’s surface at 450 kilometers per second (or nearly 1 million miles per hour), they enrich the Moon’s surface in ingredients that could make water, NASA scientists have found.
Using a computer program, scientists simulated the chemistry that unfolds when the solar wind pelts the Moon’s surface. As the Sun streams protons to the Moon, they found, those particles interact with electrons in the lunar surface, making hydrogen (H) atoms. These atoms then migrate through the surface and latch onto the abundant oxygen (O) atoms bound in the silica (SiO2) and other oxygen-bearing molecules that make up the lunar soil, or regolith. Together, hydrogen and oxygen make the molecule hydroxyl (OH), a component of water, or H2O.
China Planning a Robotic Moon Station and Far-Side Radio Telescope –“An Unobstructed Window on the Cosmos” (VIDEO)Understanding how much water — or its chemical components — is available on the Moon is critical to NASA’s goal of sending humans to establish a permanent presence there, said Orenthal James Tucker, a physicist at Goddard who spearheaded the simulation research.
“We’re trying to learn about the dynamics of transport of valuable resources like hydrogen around the lunar surface and throughout its exosphere, or very thin atmosphere, so we can know where to go to harvest those resources,” said Tucker, who recently described the simulation results in the journal JGR Planets.
The Daily Galaxy via NASA
Lunar Base image credit: ESA and Foster and Partners
A related article I read, indicated that we could perhaps look for water generated on other rocky bodies by the solar wind. I agree. Mercury seems to have ice at it's poles, source not proven yet though.
And I will say that for planets with atmospheres such as Venus and Mars, but no comprehensive magnetic field, we might also consider if water is generated.
Specifically for Mars, I understand that Hydrogen is released from water vapor during a dust storm. But I suspect that there is also a way for Hydrogen to be included to water by the solar wind. So, the solar wind may give and take Hydrogen for water.
To me this makes perhaps in error any evaluation of heavy water percentages for both Mars and Venus.
If you have an environment where Hydrogen is input into a planets atmosphere, and also taken away sometimes, then it would be natural for heavy Hydrogen to accumulate from the sun in preference to normal Hydrogen. Not proven, but a strong suspicion.
Therefore any evaluation of water loss over 4.5 billions of years from Mars, may be in error if they are calculated by the ratio of heavy Hydrogen. Maybe.
Another aspect of all of this is that it appears that some persons believe that there are an enormous number of rogue objects in the spaces between the dominance of any particular stars gravity well. To me this opens the possibility that the object that could have formed our Moon was interstellar, or a more local rogue planet, and that it brought water with it to the Earth to be.
If this were so, then an alternative to assuming that Venus, Earth, and Mars started wet is that very large impacts imparted water to some of them, and the solar wind imparted water to others. Not sure if the solar wind can impart water to the Earth. I am not thinking so, or not as much in the same way.
Anyway some questions.
And by the way the impact notion of interstellar objects implies a reason that we can't find aliens. We are just massively lucky not to have in interstellar extinction event for humans or for complex life in general.
Good reason to put humans elsewhere as well I should think. We may be pressing our luck.
Done.
]]>ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO, shows that the gaseous layer that wraps around Earth reaches up to 630 000 km away, or 50 times the diameter of our planet.
"The Moon flies through Earth's atmosphere,"