Mars Losing Parts of Itself
NASA’s MAVEN mission detects a hydrogen cloud blowing off the Red Planet10-15-2014 | Alexandra Witze and Nature magazine
The first images from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft show a planet in the process of losing parts of itself. Streams of hydrogen atoms drift away from the red planet, into the depths of space.
The pictures are the first clear look at how crucial elements erode away from the Martian atmosphere, says Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder and the mission’s principal investigator. MAVEN’s goal is to measure how the solar wind and other factors nibble away at Mars’s atmosphere, so that scientists can better extrapolate how the once-thick atmosphere has thinned over billions of years. That process transformed Mars from a relatively warm, wet planet into a mostly dry, mostly frozen wasteland.
MAVEN began orbiting Mars on September 21. The newly released images, from the craft’s ultraviolet spectrograph, were taken while it was still relatively far from the planet, completing an elliptical orbit around Mars about once every 35 hours.
An intriguing contrast would be the annual deposit of approx. 300,000 tons of space debris that Earth receives.
– Source for that little tidbit would be the rather extensive writings of Prof. Isaac Asimov.