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The Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) has spotted mottled ‘proton auroras’ above Mars, suggesting an unexpectedly chaotic interaction of the solar wind with the red planet’s upper atmosphere.
after reaching the track Mars February 9, 2021 Hope for the United Arab Emirates The spacecraft has been monitoring the red planet using tools such as the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS).The task team had hoped to use the instrument to observe changes in the composition of shoe uppers Mars atmosphereespecially the ubiquity of oxygen and carbon monoxide, and the discovery of hydrogen and oxygen escaping into space as Red Planet water ooze slowly.
To support this work, EMUS is designed to detect ultraviolet light emitted by protons (hydrogen nuclei) in the Martian atmosphere that have been solar wind, the constant stream of charged particles flowing from the sun. To the scientists’ surprise, EMUS did not see a uniform glow at these ultraviolet wavelengths, but instead showed that the emission often becomes non-uniform.
related: UAE’s Hope Mars orbiter finds elusive auroras on Red Planet
“What we’re seeing is essentially a map of the sun’s wind and rain falling on Earth,” said Mike Chaffin, a member of the Hope team at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author of a new paper detailing the findings. . , said in an emailed statement.
Mars does not have its own global magnetic field EarthIt’s designed to shield the solar wind, but its thin atmosphere still acts as a barrier, deflecting the interplanetary magnetic field carried by the solar wind around the planet. This deflection causes the solar wind to slow down and build up as it covers Mars, creating a concentration of charged particles called plasma that can interact with the remaining magnetic field lines left in regions of Mars’ crust.
Scientists already knew that this plasma environment, and its connection to the magnetic field emanating from the Martian surface, could influence how, where and when hydrogen and oxygen leak into space. It now appears that when the magnetic field carried by the solar wind aligns with magnetic field lines from the Martian surface, it can also affect the position and strength of the proton auroras, along which protons travel.
These findings are in line with NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) The mission is also in orbit around the Red Planet and will be able to observe localized plasma conditions in the upper atmosphere. Together, these two tasks provide a comprehensive understanding of what is going on.
“Access to MAVEN data is critical to putting these new observations in a broader context,” Hope’s chief scientist Hessa Al Matroushi said in the statement. “Together, we are pushing the boundaries of our current knowledge, not only of Mars, but of planetary interactions with the solar wind.”
Mars’ proton auroras were first detected by MAVEN in 2018, but the NASA mission only sees them as Earth’s uniform glow during the day. The high spatial resolution of EMUS enables the detection of patches consistent with turbulent space weather.
For example, in observations collected on Aug. 11, 2021, “Auroras are so common and disorganized that the plasma environment around Mars must have been really disturbed,” Chaffin said.
The varying degrees and locations of patchy proton auroras may indicate different conditions in the plasma environment around Mars, caused by changes in the solar wind and even Martian seasons. While there are no new results yet, the summer of 2022 coincides with the summer in the southern hemisphere of Mars, and a large number of proton auroras are expected.
“Our discovery of these mottled proton auroras adds a new event to the long list of events currently being studied by the EMM and challenges our existing views on how the Martian daytime proton auroras form,” said Al Matroushi.
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