{"id":127,"date":"2013-03-07T16:15:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-07T16:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/2013\/03\/07\/march-7th-2013-sol-210\/"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:28:39","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:28:39","slug":"march-7th-2013-sol-210","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/2013\/03\/07\/march-7th-2013-sol-210\/","title":{"rendered":"March 7th 2013 Sol 208"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A natural&nbsp;hazard for all spacecraft, including MSL, is currently&nbsp;at Mars.&nbsp; On March 5th there was a large solar flare or &#8216;Coronal Mass Ejection&#8217;.&nbsp; This sent out a&nbsp;stream of plasma from the Sun &#8211;&nbsp;which has now reached Mars.&nbsp; The radiation associated with this could damage active circuitry so Curiosity has been kept in a low activity mode.&nbsp; Data from our Radiation Asssessment Detector (RAD)&nbsp;instrument will help document the intensity of this solar storm.&nbsp; It logged radiation levels on the MSL journey to Mars after launch in&nbsp;2011.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The thin atmosphere and lack of a dipole magnetic field means that Mars is always directly exposed to this solar weather.&nbsp; During the Noachian, when Mars did have a magnetic dipole, like the Earth has today, the surface of Mars would have been more protected from solar radiation.&nbsp; Thats part of the reason many researchers think microbial life might have been possible at that time.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A natural&nbsp;hazard for all spacecraft, including MSL, is currently&nbsp;at Mars.&nbsp; On March 5th there was a large solar flare or &#8216;Coronal Mass Ejection&#8217;.&nbsp; This sent out a&nbsp;stream of plasma from the Sun &#8211;&nbsp;which has now reached Mars.&nbsp; The radiation associated with this could damage active circuitry so Curiosity has been kept in a low activity [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":370,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":695,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions\/695"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}