Atmosphere | featured news

The amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere could top 400 parts per million in May.

NASA's Curiosity rover results confirm that Mars has lost most of its atmosphere, on its way to becoming a cold, dry planet. In experimental results reported Monday at a European geoscience meeting in Vienna, Austria, a look at the Martian air by the $2.5 billion rover finds evidence that as much as 90% of the original atmosphere there has dissipated into space over the planet's lifetime. "It was still red, but it means that Mars once was a warmer, wetter world," says rover team scientist Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan. "It was also a more habitable world, essentially four billion years ago."

The idea that an ordinary person taking a trip beyond Earth's atmosphere is no longer fantasy. Private companies are soliciting passengers for commercial trips to space.

Think Mars today is a hostile place? It was worse 600,000 years ago, according to new research that suggests the planet had a dustier, stormier atmosphere. “It was an unpleasant place to hang out,” said lead researcher Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute. He said Mars’ climate was probably a lot like the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s — but a lot worse.

Record loss of the ozone, the protective atmosphere layer that shields life from the sun's harmful rays, has been observed over the Arctic in recent months, the World Meteorological Organization said on Tuesday.

The atmosphere of a relatively nearby extrasolar planet - just three times bigger than Earth - has been measured in a pioneering experiment.