photo #8819256

🛰️ Mars, it turns out, can launch its own miniature “solar storms” into space.Mars is not just passively losing its atmosphere; new observations show that it occasionally ejects explosive bursts of ionised gas, or plasma, from its upper atmosphere in events that resemble scaled‑down coronal mass ejections from the sun. These “ionospheric mass ejections” occur even though Mars lacks a global magnetic field, challenging long‑held ideas about how planets drive energetic space‑weather activity.​The discovery comes from NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mars since 2014 to study how the planet’s atmosphere escapes into space. By analysing in‑situ measurements of particles and magnetic fields, researchers identified three explosive events, in 2014, 2016 and 2019, where large cavities suddenly appeared in the ionosphere—evidence that dense plasma had been rapidly blasted away.​In these events, magnetic reconnection between strong crustal magnetic patches and open magnetic field lines accelerates ionospheric plasma to jet speeds of about 20 kilometres per second, ejecting material from around 300 kilometres altitude into space in roughly half a minute. Although far smaller than solar eruptions and unlikely to threaten spacecraft at Earth, these bursts may significantly enhance atmospheric escape from Mars and could operate on other planets without global magnetic fields, such as Venus.​By revealing that Mars can lose mass through explosive events as well as steady outflows, this work blurs the line between stellar and planetary space weather and opens fresh questions about the long‑term evolution of thin‑atmosphered worlds. Future missions and MAVEN‑like orbiters at other planets could test whether such ionospheric mass ejections are common across the galaxy.​📄 RESEARCH PAPER📌 Y. Ye et al., “In situ observation of mass ejections caused by magnetic reconnections in the ionosphere of Mars”, Nature Astronomy (2024)#fblifestyle