Mars dust storms may cause mysterious 'zodiacal light' in Earth's night sky

The report near the end says "While these models helped identify the origin of the dust particles, as well as how the particles orbit in our solar system, further research is needed to understand how dust escapes Mars' gravity, the authors said."

This is very intriguing about Mars and dust reaching escape velocity from Mars and going out into space. The link provided for the more detailed paper, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020JE006509

Said this, "What is lacking in our model is a mechanism by which the primary IDP population is created with the inclination and orbital eccentricity of Mars. Can the planet Mars source this population? A large flux of dust particles is observed by the Mars‐orbiting Maven spacecraft (Andersson et al., 2015) but the source of the dust remains a mystery; the observed distribution is thought to be inconsistent with an origin at either Mars satellite Phobos or Diemos. While Mars does suffer episodic planet‐wide dust storms (Martin & Zurek, 1993; Zurek & Martin, 1993) and Mars dust (so‐called “rocket dust”) is launched to extraordinary altitudes (Heavens et al., 2019; Spiga et al., 2013), escape from Mars would require overcoming escape velocity (∼5 km s^−1), for which no mechanism has yet been identified..."

A work for future studies and should be interesting to read follow up reports. if the report is correct, Mars is losing mass to space even as we watch today :) In October 1956, Clair Patterson published the accepted age for the solar system and Earth, 4.56 billion years old. Age of meteorites and the earth, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1956GeCoA..10..230P/abstract

Perhaps Mars has been losing mass much more rapidly then other old age estimates calculated to work with the meteorite ages (i.e. Mars lost atmosphere and water much more recently in the solar system).
 
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