Mystery Of Mars' Lost Atmosphere Solved At Last, Thanks To NASA's MAVEN Mission

In many ways, Mars is the most Earth-like planet we’ve ever examined up close, besides our own. With a history of a watery past, copious amounts of erosion, revealed sedimentary rock, volcanos, clouds, icecaps, sand dunes and features like dried-up riverbeds, there’s an entire geological history there that’s arguably as interesting as our own planet’s.
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But at just half the diameter and a few percent the mass of Earth, as well as its location at a significantly greater distance from the Sun, Mars suffered a very, very different fate from Earth. Whereas on our planet, oceans have thrived and so has life, Mars has become cold, dry, and very, very desolate. Even the newfound presence of liquid water on the Martian surface doesn’t change the fact that Mars has evolved in an incredibly different way from Earth. Without a full understanding of how this happened, the very legitimate fear is that Earth could someday follow suit, and wind up a desolate wasteland, where any surviving life will be relegated to extreme locales, rather than being ubiquitous everywhere we look.

Image credit: NASA, via http://mars.nasa.gov/allaboutmars/extreme/quickfacts/.

NASA’s Maven mission was designed to figure out exactly how Mars became this way. By measuring how the Martian atmosphere interacts with the Sun, how particles — atoms and ions — are blown off and lost to deep space, and by examining the solar wind, aurorae and other atmospheric effects, we can learn not only what’s happening to Mars at present, but how it became such a desolate world. In addition, Maven, launched in 2013, possesses the capability to communicate with rovers, landers and other satellites in orbit around Mars, meaning it can extract useful data from multiple points simultaneously, without the need for a 20 minute round-trip of the signals to Earth and back.

Image credit: © NASA / Viking 1.

Earlier today, the Maven mission announced their first science results, and what we found was a tremendous confirmation of what we expected, along with some incredibly precise details:

• Water was abundant and active on Mars for the first few hundred million years of the Solar System, with oceans, rivers, rains and more.