NASA MAVEN to Discover Why Mars has Lost its Atmosphere Over Billions of Years

NASA hopes to discover a little bit more about Mars and why it's been losing its atmosphere for the past few billion years.  Using data from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission launched this past November, researchers plan to learn a bit more about the Red Planet's history.

The MAVEN spacecraft houses a host of instruments in order to accomplish this feat. One instrument in particular will study a special component of the Martian atmosphere-ions. By studying these electrically charged particles in the Martian atmosphere, the Solar Wind Ion Analyzer (SWIA) can help researchers answer why Mars has gradually lost much of its atmosphere and has turned into a frozen, barren planet.

Once the MAVEN spacecraft is actually orbiting Mars, SWIA will spend most of its time measuring the ions in the solar wind. This solar wind is released from our sun's atmosphere, and then travels toward Mars at speeds around a million miles per hour. These particles react with neutral gas particles in Mars' upper atmosphere, which gives them the ability to escape the Red planet's gravitational pull.

"By combining SWIA measurements with measurements of escaping gases we can parameterize the loss of atmospheric gases from Mars as a function of solar wind conditions," said Jasper Halekas, one of the researchers from SSL, in a news release. "Ultimately, we want to know where the atmosphere, especially water, went, how it left, and what Mars has looked like over its entire history."

Knowing what Mars has looked like over its entire history could answer some longstanding questions about the planet. Most importantly, it could tell scientists whether or not Mars was ever suitable for life.

"The history of habitability and atmospheric loss on Mars are linked, and to decipher this history we need to understand how rates of loss of gas from Mars today depend on the properties of solar wind buffeting the upper atmosphere," said Robert Lillis at SSL in a news release. "SWIA will be one of our sets of eyes aboard MAVEN, constantly monitoring the flow of charged particles from the sun that has helped shape the patterns of atmospheric escape from Mars over billions of years."

For more information on the MAVEN mission, you can check it out here.