800+ IT
News
als RSS Feed abonnieren📚 A Space Probe Has Mapped the Winds Above Mars for the First Time
💡 Newskategorie: IT Security Nachrichten
🔗 Quelle: science.slashdot.org
Scientists have mapped out Mars's upper atmosphere wind patterns for the first time. The findings, published Thursday in Science, reinforce our understanding of the Martian climate as equal parts stable and unpredictable. From a report: The investigation uses data collected by NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which has been orbiting Mars since 2013. MAVEN has helped teach us how Mars lost its thick atmosphere billions of years ago, but it was never designed to investigate winds. Instead, the team behind the new study had a clever idea: have MAVEN rapidly swing its normally stationary Natural Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) back and forth like a windshield wiper. This swinging effect meant that NGIMS, usually used to study atmospheric chemistry, was able to offset the orbiter's own movements and measure the winds as if it were standing still. What did they find? Overall circulation patterns in Mars's upper atmosphere proved predictably stable season-to-season. But the team also found extreme variability within local pockets of the atmosphere, and so far there's no good explanation for what's causing this.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
...