{"id":614035,"date":"2026-07-31T20:23:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T20:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/614035\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T20:23:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T20:23:11","slug":"solar-storms-create-a-risk-for-mars-exploration-scientists-hadnt-expected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/614035\/","title":{"rendered":"Solar Storms Create a Risk for Mars Exploration Scientists Hadn\u2019t Expected"},"content":{"rendered":"

It took seven months to confirm that NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover was dead<\/a>. The U.S. space agency\u2019s little robotic probe had stopped communicating with Earth back on June 10, 2018<\/a>\u2014after being engulfed by a severe Martian dust storm then blanketing the entire Red Planet. It\u2019s taken years, but physicists now have some idea about why exactly that storm became so dangerous.<\/p>\n

New research presented<\/a> this month at the Royal Astronomical Society\u2019s National Astronomy Meeting has uncovered compelling evidence that radiation from solar storms is capable of magnifying weather events on Mars after penetrating the planet\u2019s weak magnetosphere. The new study scrutinized data from NASA\u2019s orbital MAVEN spacecraft and the European Space Agency\u2019s Trace Gas Orbiter to determine just how much solar energetic particle (SEP) events heat up Mars\u2019 lower atmosphere. The researchers\u2019 results surprised them: When compared to expected global temperatures estimated from the Mars Climate Database, it looks like intense solar flares and other stellar radiation can act on Martian dust storms synergistically, increasing their severity and roiling Mars\u2019 lower atmosphere.<\/p>\n

\u201cDust storms were not originally part of our investigation, so finding one happening at the same time as the heating was unexpected,\u201d Lancaster University physicist Lana Williams, who studies Martian space and atmospheric plasma dynamics, said<\/a> in a statement.\u00a0\u201cIt suggests that Mars\u2019 atmosphere and weather may respond to several events acting together, rather than each source of heating operating independently,\u201d according to Williams, who led the new study.<\/p>\n

Kicking up a storm <\/p>\n

Williams and her colleagues had originally intended to examine five SEP events to ascertain whether or not radiation from solar storms had any effect closer to the Martian surface, where actual weather patterns emerge. Past research had already documented cases where solar eruptions, like solar flares or coronal mass ejections, generated measurable effects in Mars\u2019 upper atmosphere\u2014including aurorae like Earth\u2019s own Northern Lights and additional leakage of Mars\u2019 atmospheric gases into space.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe expected that these highly energetic particles might have some effect on temperatures in Mars\u2019 lower atmosphere, but in four of the five events we studied we found no clear evidence of heating,\u201d Williams said. \u201cThe one exception occurred while a global dust storm was expanding across the planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

During this June 2018 SEP event, ESA\u2019s Trace Gas Orbiter recorded an increase of about 90 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius) at roughly 47 and 78 miles (75 and 125 kilometers) of altitude, as Williams told<\/a>\u00a0IFLScience. For context<\/a>, Mars\u2019 exobase, the altitude at which its gases start to bleed into space, begins around 87 miles (140 km) up and its most turbulent atmosphere, or homopause altitude, rests around 56 and 84 miles (90 and 135 km) high.<\/p>\n

Clouded by uncertainty <\/p>\n

Williams and her collaborators\u2014astronomers at the UK\u2019s University of Leicester and Spain\u2019s Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia-CSIC in Granada\u2014also found a July 2021 SEP event that appeared to produce a similar, albeit smaller, increase in Martian temperatures. But the team noted that these two episodes are far from enough corroborating evidence to confirm that this phenomenon is real.<\/p>\n

\u201c[A] clear heating effect is observed, but further research is required to attribute atmospheric temperature variations as a result of the global dust storms and SEP events where the two occur simultaneously,\u201d the researchers stated<\/a> in their new study.<\/p>\n

One aspect obscuring the picture is the weaker signal from the July 2021 event, which only increased temperatures somewhere between one tenth and one fifth of what the June 2018 SEP blast accomplished. Nevertheless, Williams hopes further analysis of data taken by ESA\u2019s Trace Gas Orbiter from 2022 to present might settle the issue.<\/p>\n

She said she was particularly curious about a May 2024 solar storm so strong that NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover captured evidence<\/a> of the storm\u2019s charged particles sailing toward the Martian surface on video.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a case of we just don\u2019t have the data at the minute to look further into it,\u201d as Williams told IFLScience, \u201cbut it would be interesting to look at the 2024 solar storm.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It took seven months to confirm that NASA\u2019s Opportunity rover was dead. The U.S. space agency\u2019s little robotic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":614036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[77],"tags":[18,19,17,1203,8197,133,51142],"class_list":["post-614035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mars","tag-planetary-science","tag-science","tag-solar-storms"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117016461734099125","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}