The first results of the atmospheric analyses have been published this week\u00a0in Science Magazine.\u00a0 Let by Chris Webster and the SAM team, largely from NASA AMES and jpl, they have used the Tuneable Laser Spectrometer to measure the different isotopic abundances\u00a0in the current atmosphere.\u00a0 The TLS works through absorption of energy from the lasers by the different\u00a0atomic nuclei as atmosphere is let in to the instrument.<\/p>\n
This work has shown an enrichment in heavier nuclei e.g. Argon 40 compared to Argon 36.\u00a0 The emrichment in Argon 40 (and Carbon 13) is due to the loss of the lighter isotopes of those elements during the history of the Mars atmosphere.\u00a0 There is a lot of debate about how thick the early Mars atmopshere was but many people think\u00a0it had\u00a0bars of pressure (mainly CO2).\u00a0 The atmosphere has been lost through a combination of trapping of CO2 as carbonate in the rocks and soil, impact erosion of the atmosphere, escape of lighter isotopes because of their vibration and attaining near escape velocity due to heating in the atmosphere and also through stripping by the solar wind.\u00a0 The solar wind effects became more important after the magnetic dipole field ended on Mars about\u00a04 billion years ago as the planet’s core cooled.<\/p>\n
A thicker atmosphere, lasting a long period of time, would have been able to support the sort of habitable environment that we have discovered at Yellowknife Bay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first results of the atmospheric analyses have been published this week\u00a0in Science Magazine.\u00a0 Let by Chris Webster and the SAM team, largely from NASA AMES and jpl, they have used the Tuneable Laser Spectrometer to measure the different isotopic abundances\u00a0in the current atmosphere.\u00a0 The TLS works through absorption of energy from the lasers by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":390,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","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\/149","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=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":673,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}