United States: Did you know that Mars isn’t just a cold, desolate planet? Its atmosphere and climate are like constantly shaped by the powerful forces of solar wind. This invisible stream of plasma, which is already made up of protons and electrons and also some flows from the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, at mind-blowing speeds of 400–1,000 kilometers per second. Let’s dive into how these solar winds impact the Red Planet!
When these charged particles collide with the magnetic field of a planet and it’s atmosphere then we may witness scintillating auroras over polar regions of the Earth. That being said due to the absence of global magnetic field, auroras here are more or less distributed all over the mars.
However, at times this wind can “vanish” in rather odd occurrence when there is a break in the space path of the solar wind as the sun steps up its activity. It occurs when a high ASF speed part of the solar wind winds overtakes a slow one and engulfs it in a CIR and forms a low-density cavity in the solar wind path.
As reported by phys.org, this phenomenon was noticed for three days in the month of December in 2022 during MAVEN, which stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission. Due to the absence of the solar wind pressure, Mars’s magnetic field and atmosphere stretched out by thousands of kilometers growing threefold in size. It also released a supersonic shock wave around the planet, a so-called bow shock.
New research published in this month’s Geophysical Research Letters has looked into the impact of this slow solar wind. Lot Ram, Prof. Sumanta Sarkhel of IIT Roorkee and Dr. Diptiranjan Rout of India’s National Atmospheric Research Laboratory analyzed and interpreted the data which was collected during the event by MAVEN’s Solar Wind Ion Analyzer, Magnetometer, a Langmuir Probe and the Ion Mass Spectrometer.
The researchers also found that the nightside of the planet had increased plasma density at ionosphere at the altitude range of 200 to 280 km and the peak density was 2.5 times more than during usual conditions. This is so due to an enhancement of ionospheric to a value which maybe up to two orders of magnitude more than the M and D of solar wind.