NASA MAVEN

                                                                        MAVEN

Mars is the most sought interesting and curious planet in the solar system for us on earth. The Red Planet has the closest possible habitable situations for us earthlings if we ever plan on colonizing the solar system. NASA‘s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) started its journey on November, 2014 and studies the planet’s upper atmosphere. The latest discovery from MAVEN reveals that Mars has a twisted “tail”.

This invisible magnetic tail is said to form a twisted shape when interacting with the solar wind. As explained by Gina DiBraccio of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Mars’ magnetic tail isn’t “like the magnetotail found at Venus, a planet with no magnetic field of its own, nor is it like Earth’s, which is surrounded by its own internally generated magnetic field. Instead, it is a hybrid between the two.”

Plasma explosions from the sun over billions of years have all but stripped Mars of its atmosphere. But a new discovery by NASA shows that remnants of the Red Planet’s magnetic field can be found in the form of a rotating ‘tail’.

Invisible to the naked eye, the so-called ‘magnetotail’ was recently detected by NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission spacecraft (MAVEN).

MAVEN was launched in 2013 to trace the Martian world’s climate history and determine if it may have once sustained life.