Water on Mars gone with the wind: NASA

Solar storms stripped away planet’s atmosphere, turning wet environment into desert

Solar storms are responsible for the Red Planet’s desert-like environment, new research from NASA reveals.

Without a magnetic field to hold it together, the atmosphere of Mars was whisked away, causing almost all the water to dry up.

NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) helped un- cover Mars’s transition from a warm, wet environment to a barren desert. The mission, which NASA boasts is on time and under budget, sought to answer one question: What happened to the water on Mars?

“I’ll quote Bob Dylan: the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,” said NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown at a press conference in Washington, D.C. MAVEN measurements indicate that the solar wind strips away gas at a rate of about 100 grams every second. The findings were published in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters.

Earlier expeditions had shown that ancient Mars once had rivers, valleys and even lakes, suggesting that the atmosphere was much denser and the temperature of the planet much warmer.

Mars lost its magnetic field early on in the planet’s history, which meant that solar winds were able to pelt the planet. On Earth, our two magnetic poles help divert winds away from the atmosphere.

“Like the theft of a few coins from a cash register every day, the loss becomes significant over time,” said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colo- rado, in a release.

Jakosky said that atmospheric erosion increased significantly during solar storms, and that the loss rate was probably much higher billions of years ago, when the sun was young and more active.

The earth loses atmospheric particles all the time, but not at a rate that should worry us, Jakosky said. But if the planet were ever to get cold and our magnetic fields were to die, then we’d be in trouble.

As climate change continues to ravage the Earth, some people have suggested the possibility of terraforming Mars by adding carbon dioxide found in the crust to the atmosphere. But Jakosky said MAVEN’s results suggest that is unlikely, because there just isn’t an atmosphere to start with.

“People talk about terraforming Mars, taking the (carbon dioxide) that might be locked up in the crust and putting it back in the atmosphere,” Jakosky said.

“If that’s where all the (carbon dioxide) had gone, that might be possible. But with it having been stripped away from space, it’s not there. It’s been removed from the solar system entirely, so it’s not possible to bring it back.”