The first global map of the winds circulating in the highest part of the Mars atmosphere is ready: based on data collected by NASA's Maven probe (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN), it will help to reconstruct the past of the Red Planet and better understand the dynamics of the earth's atmosphere. This is indicated in the study published in the journal Science by a US collaboration formed by NASA, University of Maryland Baltimore County, University of Michigan and George Mason University.
The idea of the map of the twenty Martians was born in 2016, when the Maven probe had already collected three years of successes in orbit around the Red Planet. The researchers led by the planetologist Mehdi Benna proposed to the mission team to reprogram the probe and its Ngims spectrometer (Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer) to verify if some parts of the instrument, usually still, could move like a windshield wiper with sufficient speed to collect data on the circulation of winds in the highest part of the atmosphere (140-240 km high). After the initial mistrust, fueled by the fear of blowing up the whole mission, the team accepted the challenge: the remote reprogramming did not damage the probe and finally made it possible to measure the winds.
The data, collected from 2016 to 2018 for two days a month, reserved several surprises. The first is that the circulation of the Martian winds has a very stable trend over the seasons, while in the short term it shows a variability much higher than expected. The second surprise is that the highest part of the Martian atmosphere (up to 280 kilometers high) forms gigantic 'waves' that reflect the conformation of the soil, or the presence of mountains, valleys and canyons.
