A NASA spacecraft has discovered that the magnetic tail of Mars is twisted by the solar twist , yield it a unique poop unlike anything pick up in the Solar System .
The discovery was made by NASA ’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Mission ( MAVEN ) space vehicle , which is currently in orbit around the Red Planet . This spacecraft has previously throw illumination on how Marslost its atmosphere .
This sentence around , a squad from NASA reported at the 49th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society ’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Provo , Utah what the magnetotail of Mars depend like .
Mars does not have a global magnetised field of study any longer , having fall behind it zillion of years ago through a physical process that ’s not quite understood yet . This led to the loss of its standard pressure , and in the end the evaporation of the oceans on its control surface .
However , it still has a remnant fossil charismatic field that ’s embedded in parts of the surface . In this discipline , the researchers found that the solar wind interacted with this field of operations to produce a tail behind the planet , in a process calledmagnetic reconnection .
We are just starting to understand this unconscious process in Earth ’s magnetized domain . It essentially involves solar wind and Earth ’s magnetic field line ( or Mars , in this case ) snapping together , releasing a Brobdingnagian amount of energy . On Earth , this process drives our aurora .
On Mars , however , this procedure seems to be producing a perverted tail . This is because of the patchwork surface magnetic fields , which creates a kind of hybrid bottom between that of Earth and that of Venus , which has a scaled down variant of ours . Venus has aninduced magnetized fieldcaused by the Sun .
“ We recover that Mars ’ magnetic after part , or magnetotail , is singular in the Solar System , ” said Gina DiBraccio of NASA ’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt , Maryland in astatement .
“ It ’s not like the magnetotail found at Venus , a planet with no magnetic battlefield of its own , nor is it like solid ground ’s , which is fence by its own internally generated magnetic field . Instead , it is a hybrid between the two . ”
The team now want to see how reconnection has affected atmospheric loss on Mars , by looking if the escaped particles match to area of reconnection . They also want to observe out how the surface magnetic fields move the tail as Mars rotates .
“ Mars is really complicated but really interesting at the same clock time , ” said DiBraccio .
