NASA discovers phenomenon that could have led to water loss on Mars
The new research comes after a decade of exploration by NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmospheric Volatile Evolution) mission shows evidence of an escape process known as "sputtering," during which atoms are knocked out of the atmosphere by what are known as "charge particles," NASA said in a release.
"It's like doing a cannonball in a pool," Shannon Curry, a principal investigator with the MAVEN mission and a co-author of the research report, said. "The cannonball, in this case, is the heavy ions crashing into the atmosphere really fast and splashing neutral atoms and molecules out."
Scientists have an abundance of evidence that water existed on the Martian surface billions of years ago, but they have been trying to find out where it went. Research has shown that when Mars lost its magnetic field, its surface was exposed to solar wind storms that allowed the liquid water to escape into space.
But that does not explain why the once-thick Martian atmosphere was almost entirely stripped away. Sputtering, the new report says, could help explain it.
"It's like we found the ashes from a campfire," Curry continued. "But we wanted to see the actual fire, in this case sputtering, directly.
The team used a series of MAVEN tools to measure several atmospheric factors in both daylight and dark at low altitudes to observe the phenomenon, which took years to complete.
"The combination of data from these instruments allowed scientists to make a new kind of map of sputtered argon in relation to the solar wind," the NASA release said. "This map revealed the presence of argon at high altitudes in exact locations that the energetic particles crashed into the atmosphere and splashed out argon, showing sputtering in real time."
Researchers determined at least one of the causes for the loss of water on the Martian surface, but they were also able to recreate the conditions that may have made the planet inhabitable billions of years ago.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
UPI
3 hours ago
- UPI
Former DOGE attorney launches 'America-first' AI Innovation Council
President Trump discusses artificial intelligence at the White House on January 21 after announcing a national $500 billion AI private sector infrastructure investment. File Photo by Aaron Schwartz/UPI | License Photo July 23 (UPI) -- The AI Innovation Council opened on Wednesday in the nation's capital to help make the United States the world's leader in artificial intelligence innovation. Former Department of Government Efficiency general counsel James Burnham announced the council's opening in Washington, D.C., to support President Donald Trump's policy of global AI dominance. "Artificial intelligence is a revolutionary technology with the potential to make the United States wealthier and greater than it has ever been," Burnham said in a news release. "That's why President Trump made clear in his first week back in office that 'the policy of the United States is to sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness and national security,'" Burnham said. The AI Innovation Council describes itself as an independent policy forum to advance U.S. leadership in AI. New technologies often lead to monopolies that control them, but Burnham said that should not stop the nation from pursuing AI innovation. "I have been as outspoken as anyone about the problems of big tech and monopoly power," he added, "but it's a major mistake to let legitimate concerns about past abuses block new innovators from propelling our nation into a new golden age." The AI Innovation Council will advocate for regulatory controls that balance oversight and innovation, so established companies and new ones develop revolutionary AI products in the United States, according to Burnham. "The goal isn't just to win the innovation race," he said. "It's to help launch America's golden age." Trump on July 15 announced more than $100 billion in energy-and AI-related investments that he said would create an AI economy in the United States. He said the investments will create tens of thousands of jobs in the energy and AI sectors and help the nation improve its economic standing among global AI producers. Trump announced the investments during the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh.
CBS News
4 hours ago
- CBS News
NASA probes will study how solar wind triggers potentially dangerous "space weather"
SpaceX launched twin satellites for NASA Wednesday that will study how the electrically-charged solar wind interacts with Earth's magnetic field, creating constantly changing and occasionally dangerous "space weather" affecting satellites, electrical grids and other critical systems. The identical TRACERS satellites will operate in the magnetosphere, "the region around our Earth that is dominated by the planet's magnetic field, and it protects us from the stellar radiation and really from everything else that's going on in space," said Joseph Westlake, director of NASA's solar physics division. "What we will learn from TRACERS is critical for the understanding and eventually the predicting of how energy from our sun impacts the Earth and our space and ground-based assets, whether it be GPS or communication signals, power grids, space assets and our astronauts working up in space. "It's going to help us keep our way of life safe here on Earth." Hitching a ride to space along with TRACERS atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket were five other small satellites, including one that will use a new "polylingual" terminal to communicate with multiple other satellites and space probes using different protocols. Another will collect data about how much solar energy Earth absorbs and reemits into space, known as the "radiation budget," and another that will focus on how high-energy "killer electrons" are knocked out of the Van Allen radiation belts to rain down into the atmosphere. Two other small satellites were aboard, including an experimental "cubesat" that will test high-speed 5G communications technology in space and another built by an Australian company carrying five small satellites to test space-based air-traffic management technology that could provide aircraft tracking and communications anywhere in the world. The mission got underway at 2:13 p.m. EDT when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared to life at launch complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base on the California coast. The launching one day late because of a regional power outage Tuesday that interrupted air traffic communications over the Pacific Ocean near Vandenberg. The second time around, the countdown ticked smoothly to zero and after boosting the upper stage and payloads out of the lower atmosphere, the first stage peeled away, reversed course and flew back to a landing near the launch pad. A few seconds later, the upper stage engine shut down to put the vehicle in its planned preliminary orbit. The two satellites making up the primary TRACERS payload were deployed about an hour-and-a-half after launch. Two of the other smallsats were to be released earlier in a slightly different orbit, with the remainder following TRACERS a few minutes later. TRACERS is an acronym for Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites. The twin spacecraft, built by Boeing, will fly in tandem in the same orbit, 10 seconds to two minutes apart, helping researchers precisely measure rapid changes indicating how the solar wind "couples" with Earth's magnetic field. "So the Sun is a burning, fiery ball of plasma and as it burns, it blows off an exhaust that we call the solar wind, it's a plasma, and that's always streaming from the sun towards the Earth," said David Miles, principal investigator at the University of Iowa. "And sometimes, the magnetic field of the Earth basically stands it off in the same way that if you have a rock in a stream, the water kind of flows around it. But other times, those two systems couple (and) you dump mass, energy and momentum into the Earth system." That coupling drives spectacular auroral displays, "but it also drives some of the negative things that we want to... understand and mitigate, like unplanned electrical currents in our electrical grids that can potentially cause accelerated aging in electrical pipelines, disruption of GPS, things like that." "So what we're looking at trying to understand is how the coupling between those systems changes in space and in time," Miles said. The goals of the other satellites launched Wednesday range from basic science to technology development. The Polylingual Experimental Terminal, or PExT, will test equipment capable of sending and receiving data from multiple government and commercial satellites across multiple communications protocols. The goal is to streamline communications to and from a wide variety of satellites and space probes to improve efficiency and lower costs. Another satellite, known as Athena-EPIC, will continue ongoing measurements of Earth's radiation budget, the balance between solar energy coming into Earth's environment compared to the energy radiated back out into space. Using spare parts from earlier missions, Athena-EPIC will test innovative LEGO-like satellite components intended to lower costs while reducing the size of satellites. The Relativistic Atmospheric Loss, or REAL, satellite, another small cubesat, will study how electrons in the Van Allen radiation belts get knocked out of place to pose threats to satellites and other systems. Robyn Millan of Dartmouth University is the principal investigator. "The radiation belts are a region surrounding the Earth that are filled with high-energy charged particles that are traveling at near the speed of light," she said. "These are sometimes called killer electrons because these particles are a hazard for our satellites in space. They also rain down on our atmosphere where they can contribute to ozone destruction." The REAL cubesat weighs less than 10 pounds and measures just a foot long. Despite its small size, "it carries a powerful particle sensor that will for the first time make very rapid measurements of these electrons as they enter our atmosphere, and this is really critical for understanding what's scattering them." What makes REAL unique, she said, was the sensor's small size, allowing it to be carried by a cubesat, which "could enable future missions, especially those requiring constellations of satellites."
Miami Herald
4 hours ago
- Miami Herald
Amazon to close China-based AI research lab
July 23 (UPI) --Amazon will shut down its AI research lab in a cost-cutting move as tensions flare with China and as other global companies seek to leave the nation because of Chinese influence. The Shanghai-based Amazon Web Services announced job layoffs last week while as the conglomerate shutters its artificial intelligence and development wing. The closures were first reported by The Financial Times. It was due to "strategic adjustments amid U.S.-China tensions," an applied scientist at the lab, Wang Minjie, wrote on WeChat early this week as Amazon disbanded the team. It was not immediately clear how many people or jobs were affected. The Shanghai facility was established in 2018 to focus on areas such as machine learning and processing natural language. In a statement, company spokesman Brad Glasser said Amazon "made the difficult business decision to eliminate some roles across particular teams" in its AWS division. Meanwhile, a growing number of American corporate giants, like Microsoft and IBM, have opted to either downsize or end operations in China as geopolitical tensions rise exasperated by U.S. President Donald Trump's fluctuating tariff policies. It came the same day McKinsey & Company, a large U.S. defense contractor, also revealed it was pulling back its own AI base in China as companies look to other nations such as India. About 300 India-based Chinese workers at FoxConn, Apple's main iPhone producer, were ordered to return home earlier this month by Chinese authorities as Apple looks elsewhere, too, for its business operations. Amazon has been actively retreating from China in recent years, going so far in 2019 to shut down the e-commerce giant's Chinese marketplace. Copyright 2025 UPI News Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
