NASA's MAVEN gives insight into what happened to the atmosphere on Mars: originally published 11/6/2015

In September of last year NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) orbiter entered Martian space on a mission to find out what happened to the planets atmosphere. Since that day the orbiter has been transmitting data back to Earth where NASA's scientist have been analyzing it to find out what stripped that atmosphere away. According to a press conference on November 5 the answer to the question is it was our own solar system that has been slowly destroying the Martian atmosphere over several billions of years.

“Measurements by MAVEN shed light on how the upper atmosphere interacts with the Sun and solar wind, and the ability of gases to escape to space—both important processes for understanding planetary atmospheres,“ they wrote in paper published in Science magazine.

As an article in the New York Times says 4.5 billion years of these atmospheric leaks that the solar system caused would not be able to totally deplete the planet. The scientist agree and are not saying that this is the sole cause of the atmospheres demise. Some of the other data also suggest that bombardments of particles from the Sun was also a factor in the erosion of the atmosphere.

“What this tells us is loss through space has been an important process,” said Bruce M. Jakosky, a scientist at the Laboratory for Atmosphere and Space Physics at the University of Colorado and principal investigator for the MAVEN mission.

For decades NASA has been sending unmanned missions to Mars. With the last couple of those missions they found evidence that Mars once had an atmosphere not much unlike that of Earth. This evidence prompted the scientist at NASA to begin work on the MAVEN project to find out more about this once thriving Martian atmosphere, what happened, and could we be doomed to a similar fate.