The atmosphere of Mars may disappear by the action of the solar wind, which strikes with great force the Red Planet, explaining that lost water that once covered the northern hemisphere, today reported the US Space (NASA).
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The new findings of Volatile Evolution Mission and Atmospheric Mars (Maven) spacecraft indicate that the planet is suffering the bombardment of solar particles that erode the upper atmosphere at a rate of about ten pounds per second, a factor that is 10 to 20 more times than usual.
"What this tells us is that the loss through space has been an important process," said Bruce M. Jakosky scientist Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado and principal investigator for the mission at a press Maven Press in Washington.
According to NASA scientists, billions of years ago, in the beginning, the sun was much more active and unstable causing numerous solar storms may be the reason Mars, much more exposed than the Earth to these phenomena , pass to be a warm and wet planet to the current cold place and is now desert.
Maven spacecraft, launched on November 18, 2013 to solve the mystery of how Mars lost most of its atmosphere and its mass of water, entered Mars orbit in September and must complete a mission one year.
Maven data try to supplement those provided by the rover Curiosity, which reveal that Mount Sharp on Mars, located inside the crater Gale, could be formed by sediments deposited in the bed of a lake millions of years ago.