In recent days scientist have discovered why and how Mars has lost its atmosphere in the last millions of years. Most of its atmosphere has been striped away by the sun's solar wind and its still happening today, but one question that has come up is what has happened to most of the carbonate in Mars's atmosphere. On November 24, 2015 a team from California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory published a paper showing what might have happened to all this carbonate. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, and it has a ratio of carbon-12 and carbon-13 favoring the latter. So what happened to all the carbon-12 where has it gone too. One explanation is that some of the carbon-12 has been ejected into space from the top of the Martian atmosphere by solar winds, but Renyu HU and his team have found another way carbon-12 was thrown out and left the atmosphere rich in carbon-13. The way this has happened is from the UV intensity due to the lack of an atmosphere. Since the atmosphere is very thin more UV light form the sun enters into Mars. When there is carbonate in the air, the UV light can actually break it apart and make carbon-12/13 with one oxygen atom, this process give energy to the atoms and actually can be enough to escape the atmosphere out into space. Carbon-12 has a 40% chance of escape while carbon-13 has a 24% chance of escaping, favoring the carbon-12 which explains why there is more carbon-13 found with in Mars itself.
Question: What will happen when the atmosphere of the planet is completely gone? Can the atmosphere be rebuilt?
I do not really know much this subject, but I think that once the atmosphere is completely gone the planet will have surges in temperature from night and day, it will have no winds, and would have more craters since it cant defend from meteors, and its gravity would be less as well.
The atmosphere can be rebuilt by introducing more elements into the atmosphere, but would still be blown away from solar wind, so in order to keep the atmosphere from blowing away, the magnetic field of the planet needs to be stronger, in order to defend itself from the solar wind just like Earth does.
Professor Siana could you please correct me and answer these questions thank you.
sources:
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/msl/loss-of-carbon-in-martian-atmosphere-explained
4 points.
ReplyDeleteThe craters last *longer* when there is no atmosphere, as it is the wind in the atmosphere that is primarily responsible for eroding the craters (compare the Earth to the Moon). Also, there is so little mass that the atmosphere doesn't affect the gravitational acceleration. Furthermore, on the surface, even if the atmosphere did have a significant mass, the gravitational force from mass distributed at larger radii (in the atmosphere) in a spherically symmetric way will actually cancel and there will be no change in gravitational acceleration at the surface.
3 points.