How Mars Lost Its Atmosphere and Liquid Water

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How Mars Lost Its Atmosphere and Liquid Water

The NASA MAVEN team believes the planet was once warm and wet. What happened?

The results of a year's worth of studies on Mars are in. Almost 50 new research papers have been submitted to Science and the Geophysical Research Letters on Mars and whether it was, at one point, habitable. And a key factor in all of this is the water. Where did it go?

The team behind NASA's MAVEN, a probe sent to gather information on the Martian atmosphere, theorizes that solar winds could have stripped away Mars' atmosphere. The team believes the planet was once warm and wet, but as solar winds constantly crashed into it, ions were heated up quickly and simply escaped the atmosphere, leaving no hydrogen with which water could be formed.

This "atmospheric escape" happens to every planet. Earth is good at retaining its gases, for better or worse, because of our global magnetic fields and higher gravity, and we mostly don't notice it because we lose so little. But Mars, which is farther from the sun, is in a much worse position to keep its gases, and therefore, its liquid water.

Correction: An earlier version of this story, egregiously, said that Mars is closer to the Sun than Earth. That was a typo and is incorrect.