Here's How Mars Lost Its Warm And Wet Atmosphere In The Long Run

• comments
• 
• 

Mars was once a warm, wet planet and was believed to allow human life to exist. But this red planet became a worthless desert world due to the influence of solar wind and radiation over billions of years.

The people who worked with NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft concluded the idea. They discovered that Mars little by little mislaid its argon and other gasses due to a process called "sputtering," ABC News reported.

The MAVEN’s Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) evaluated the calculations from the Martian upper atmosphere. It showed that huge amount of gas contained in Mars has been lost as time passes by.

According to Mail Online, the researchers pointed out solar wind and radiation as the primary reason why Mars lost its atmosphere, although many circumstances are being considered in removing gas in the rocks including chemical reactions. Almost 65 percent of the argon previously found on Mars has been washed away.

Argon is a noble gas thus it couldn’t react with chemicals. This only means that “sputtering” is the primary cause why this form of gas was shed off from the space, the researchers explained. It was found that ions collected by the solar wind sweep into Mars at extreme speeds. The atmospheric gas of the red planet was then whipped out physically.

In 2015, the researchers reported that Mars was losing some of its atmospheric gas. Now, they are assessing significant measures of the incident's effect on the red planet.

"We’ve determined that most of the gas ever present in the Mars atmosphere has been lost to space," Bruce Jakosky, a principal investigator for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN), University of Colorado, Boulder said. “We determined that the majority of the planet’s CO2 was also lost to space by sputtering,” he added.