A series of papers has outlined the first results from NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mars since September 2014. In one paper, Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado Boulder and his colleagues report MAVEN data showing that when ...
How Mars is losing its atmosphereThe rover will continue to study the local environment in the Gale Crater during April, before new instructions are beamed from Earth after the passing of the Mars solar conjunction, which partially blocks Mars from the Earth.Steve Down...
Mars is a cold, inhospitable desert today, but features like dry riverbeds and minerals that only form withliquid waterindicate that long ago it had a thick atmosphere that retained enough heat for liquid water—a necessary ingredient for life—to flow on the surface. It appears that Mars lo...
Mars is a cold, inhospitable desert today, but features like dry riverbeds and minerals that only form withliquid waterindicate that long ago it had a thick atmosphere that retained enough heat for liquid water—a necessary ingredient for life—to flow on the surface. It appears that Mars lo...
This provides not only supportive evidence for the loss of much of Mars' original atmosphere, but also gives clues to how the loss occurred. It suggests that the planet's atmosphere escaped from the top, rather than due to the lower atmosphere interacting with the ground, NASA's web story ...
How to watch NASA’s oldest active astronaut launch to the ISS on Wednesday A mission can come to an end in several ways. If a spacecraft is reliant on solar power, as many are, then it may peter out as its panels lose efficacy. That’s what happened to theInSight lander on Mars,...
At the station's orbiting altitudes, Earth's atmosphere is extremely thin, but still thick enough to drag on the ISS and slow it down. Therefore, the ISS must be boosted every so often, lest it veer off-course and lose altitude by decelerating. The Russian Zvezda service module has engine...
Some of this precipitation is captured by tree canopies and evaporates again into the atmosphere. The precipitation that hits the ground becomes runoff, which can accumulate and freeze into snow caps or glaciers. It can also infiltrate the ground and accumulate, eventually storing in aquifers. An ...
When that wind slams into Earth's ionosphere, or upper atmosphere, the aurora is born. In the Northern Hemisphere, the phenomenon is called the northern lights (aurora borealis), while in the Southern Hemisphere, it's called the southern lights (aurora australis). "These particles are ...
Mostly, the Earth's atmosphere blocks out photons with a shorter wavelength than ultraviolet light. This makes it difficult to study the Sun's inner workings from Earth directly. However, we do have our ways.Many ground-based telescopesuse a grid of sensors also known as a charge-coupled dev...