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NASA's Maven Mission Solves the Mystery of Mars' Lost Atmosphere

StartsWithABang writes: If you came to the Solar System some 500 million years after its formation, you would've found two world with oceans of liquid water, continents and all the conditions we know of for life to begin thriving: Earth and Mars. But unlike our own world, Mars' organic history was cut short when it lost its atmosphere and became a barren, desert wasteland. While we had some pretty compelling theories as to how this happened, it was only with the advent of the Maven mission and its first science results that we discovered exactly how, how fast and when Mars lost its atmosphere. One cool discovery: aurorae appear diffuse and all over the entire night sky on Mars!

3 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What would it take to replace Mars's atmosphere by Sowelu · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...new idea. If you already have the crazy tech necessary to do all that, just have your robots fabricate enclosed colony space instead. Mine, smelt, build roof. Yeah it's still ridiculous future technology, but if all you want is to make the place livable, it's a lot faster if you just make a bunch of buildings. Hell, in the amount of time it would take to crack all those atmospheric gases, you could have your crazy future robots just build an entire planet-covering roof for an enormous habitation space. It would take less work.

  2. Two planets with water and air? by dryeo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Submission claims that for the first 1/2 billion years there were 2 planets with water and air. What about Venus?
    Venus was also possibly inhabitable for the first part of its life, perhaps billions of years, until the Sun got warm enough to boil the Venusian oceans and created a runaway greenhouse affect.
    Same thing is predicted for the Earth as the Sun continues to heat up (due to having a higher percentage of helium with time and therefore higher density) perhaps in as soon as 500 million years.

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  3. Re:Summary missing information by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Let me get this straight: the 8 page article with pictures and videos had more information than the 4 sentence summary?

    The problem is precisely that it is not a summary, but a clickbait paragraph. The title mentions a mystery solved, but you get zero info about it by reading the non-summary.