The Red Planet's low gravity and lack of magnetic field makes its outermost atmosphere an easy target to be swept away by the solar wind, but new evidence from ESA's Mars Express spacecraft shows that the Sun's radiation ...
Space Exploration
Feb 9, 2018
7
528
Like Earth, space has weather. Except instead of swirling winds and downpours of precipitation, space weather is defined by shifting electric and magnetic fields and rains of charged particles. At the very beginning of space, ...
Space Exploration
Jan 4, 2018
0
32
Despite the absence of a global Earth-like magnetic dipole, the Martian atmosphere is well protected from the effects of the solar wind on ion escape from the planet. New research shows this using measurements from the Swedish ...
Space Exploration
Dec 8, 2017
8
1178
A team of NASA scientists want to use Earth as a laboratory to understand how planets lose their atmospheres and has proposed a mission that the agency recently selected as one of five for further consideration as a possible ...
Space Exploration
Nov 14, 2017
0
56
When Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) passed just 140,000 kilometres from Mars on 19th October 2014, depositing a large amount of debris in the martian atmosphere, space agencies coordinated multiple spacecraft to witness ...
Space Exploration
Sep 21, 2017
3
3
You may have seen the media images of bays and coastlines along Hurricane Irma's track, in which the ocean has eerily "disappeared", leaving locals amazed and wildlife stranded. What exactly was happening?
Environment
Sep 13, 2017
0
7
As the energetic particles of the solar wind speed across interplanetary space, their motion is modified by objects in their path. A study, based on data from ESA's Mars Express orbiter, has thrown new light on a surprising ...
Space Exploration
Aug 22, 2017
15
183
A novel mission concept involving two CubeSats connected by a thin, miles-long tether could help scientists understand how the moon got its mysterious "tattoos"—swirling patterns of light and dark found at more than 100 ...
Space Exploration
Aug 8, 2017
0
19
On June 17, NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission) will celebrate 1,000 Earth days in orbit around the Red Planet. Since its launch in November 2013 and its orbit insertion in September 2014, MAVEN ...
Space Exploration
Jun 16, 2017
2
299
Senior Scientist Tamara M. Rogers of the Planetary Science Institute has discovered that substantial variability in the winds on the hot giant exoplanet HAT-P-7b are due to magnetism, and used those measurements to develop ...
Astronomy
May 15, 2017
2
207
