Nasa English news | Nasa, Latest News & Live Updates in English | English News (Latest English News) at Lokmattimes.com

The new map of Mars winds helps scientists to better understand the workings of the Martian climate, giving them a more accurate picture of its ancient past and its ongoing evolution."The observed global circulation provides critical inputs needed to constrain global atmospheric models," said Mehdi Benna of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland."These are the same models that are used to extrapolate the state of the Martian climate into the distant past," added Benna in the first paper published in the journal Science.MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission) celebrated the five-year anniversary of its entrance into orbit around Mars on September 21.The primary scientific goal of the mission is to study what is left of Mars' atmosphere to determine how, in the distant past, an ocean-covered and potentially habitable Mars became the dry and desolate place it is today."The winds observed in the Martian upper atmosphere are sometimes similar to what we see in global model simulations, but other times can be quite different," said Kali Roeten of University of Michigan."These winds can also be highly variable on the timescale of hours, yet in other cases, are consistent throughout the observation period, said Roeten in the second paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets.Upper atmospheric winds on Earth have already been mapped in detail.Winds drive a series of processes in the atmosphere that can affect the propagation of radio waves, which are crucial for communications purposes for those on the surface, and the prediction of paths satellites will take in their orbit around Earth.Mapping Martian winds, therefore, is a crucial step towards understanding characteristics of extraterrestrial atmospheres beyond what we know about processes on Earth.The upper atmospheric winds on both Earth and Mars are in the planets' respective thermospheres, which are areas where temperature increases with height.This discovery was the first detection of topography-induced gravity wave ripples in the thermosphere of any planet, even Earth.( With inputs from IANS )

NasaFOLLOW

Nasa, Latest News

Today all the attention will be on the sky as everyone will witness the last celestial treat of 2019. Before entering into 2020, people in certain parts of the world will be able to witness the last Solar Eclipse of the season. Surya Grahan also cal ...

Boeing's new Starliner spacecraft has returned to Earth on Sunday, landing at a designated site in New Mexico north of El Paso, after it failed to dock with the International Space Station, according to NASA. ...

A research team witnessed the presence of a candy cane-like structure at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy days before Christmas festival. Images from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) revealed the presence. ...

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft was being readied for its first orbital flight test, an uncrewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program. ...

Using images from NASAs Solar Dynamics Observatory,a team of scientists including those from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bengaluru has observed a magnetic explosion the likes of which ...

Elon Musk smoking weed live on air is still fresh in mind and now, an agri-tech company named Front Range Biosciences is planning to send marijuana to the International Space Station (ISS) onboard a SpaceX cargo flight in March next year to understan ...

Space missions are expected to fail which must not deter the scientific community in India that saw the Vikram lander not making it to the lunar surface from attempting again, as this is the business out there, Tom Soderstrom, Chief Innovation and Te ...

Using data from NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, researchers have created the first-ever map of wind circulation in the upper atmosphere of Mars. ...