Sep 21, 2010 10:35 GMT  ·  By

Taking advantage of the fact that the European Space Agency launched the most complex and powerful space telescope in the world last year, an expert team has conducted a series of new investigations on the Martian atmosphere, that are likely to clear up some long-standing mysteries.

The Herschel Space Observatory was launched on May 14, 2009, on the same Ariane 5 heavy-lift delivery system that also carried the Planck Telescope.

The impressive telescope features three major payloads: the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI), the Photodetector Array Camera & Spectrometer (PACS), and the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE).

Research team has used the amazing observational power these instruments have to look at the Martian atmosphere, and gain a clearer picture as to its composition.

Herschel was primarily developed to look for objects located deep within the Universe, billions of light-years away from the Milky Way. But it can also be used to collect spectral readings of objects located closer to home, such as Mars.

Discovering water-related chemistry is its primary goal, and the experts who conducted the first Martian studies using Herschel announce that their discoveries could change our understanding of the Red Planet's atmosphere entirely.

The announcement will be made today, September 21, at the European Planetary Science Congress, which is being held in Rome, Italy.

“Water vapor plays a key role in the Martian atmospheric chemistry and physics,” explains study team member Dr. Paul Hartogh, who is based at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, in Germany.

What the team operating Herschel managed to obtain was the first accurate, globally-averaged temperature profile of the Martian atmosphere, Universe Today reports.

“Our sub-mm [millimeter] observations provide for the first time a vertical profile of molecular oxygen in the Martian atmosphere,” the MPI expert says.

“We found that, contrary to the general assumption of a constant O2 content independently of altitude, the Martian atmosphere is richer in oxygen near the ground and then O2 decreases rapidly with altitude,” Hartogh adds.

This type of investigation wouldn't have been possible with spacecrafts such as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) or the Mars Odyssey, which are at this point in orbit around the Red Planet.

Such accurate investigations are only possible with telescopes as precise as Herschel.