Scientists Reveal Hidden Secrets of Mars' Ionosphere

Scientists Reveal Hidden Secrets of Mars' Ionosphere

On November 13, 2020, a pair of European Space Agency spacecraft—Mars Express and the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter—set out to gain a deeper understanding of the Martian ionosphere. Utilizing an advanced method known as mutual radio occultation, these two orbiters sent signals to one another while passing behind the Red Planet. The resulting data significantly expanded our knowledge of this crucial atmospheric layer, which, much like Earth’s ionosph…

Scientists Spot Sputtering on Mars

Mars’s current atmosphere is downright tenuous—conferring less than 1% the pressure of Earth’s—but there’s good evidence that it was substantially thicker in the past. Researchers have now directly observed atoms escaping in a hitherto unobserved way. That process, known as atmospheric sputtering, may have facilitated Mars’s transition from a watery planet to the arid world it is today, the team reported in Science Advances. “I’ve been looking f…