New research published last month in Nature Astronomy may finally reveal more information about Mars’ catastrophic history. The new research aimed to find out what happened to Mars’ magnetosphere. Many believe that it vanished in its past.
This latest research relies heavily on data captured by NASA’s Insight Lander, as well as China’s Zhurong Martian Rover. These two spacecraft’s data point to some fascinating discoveries. One of them is that Mars has pockets of magnetic energy of different magnitudes at various locations.
These differences in the magnetism found in different places are rather extreme, too. On a normal basis, the Martian surface has an average global magnitude of just 200 nT. However, InSight recorded magnitudes of up to 2,000 nT. While that huge difference was notable, it was made even more notable when Zhurong discovered a magnitude of just 20 nT somewhere else on the planet. As such, it seems that there are parts of the planet where the magnetosphere is still stronger.
Other areas are much weaker, though, which leads many to believe that there could have been some kind of catastrophe associated with the change. Understanding how the Martian Magnetosphere changed or disappeared is crucial to NASA’s ongoing exploration of the Red Planet.
With NASA planning a manned mission to Mars sometime in the next decade, getting a good understanding of how the planet came to the point it is now, and even learning about the circumstances that brought it here is going to provide a lot of good information for astronomers to make use of. And if that wasn’t enough, learning all of that can help us better understand the planet as a whole.
This new discovery can be read about in detail in the paper, which was headed by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Science.
The post The remains of a huge catastrophe were found scattered across Mars appeared first on BGR.
