MARS LEAKS FASTER WHEN IT’S CLOSER TO THE SUN
The Red Planet has lost enough water to space to form a global ocean hundreds of kilometres deep
Reported by Keith Cooper
Seasonal changes can have a dramatic effect on how quickly Mars loses its water to space, a joint study between the S Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission has shown. Over 3 billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet, with large bodies of water on its surface and a thicker atmosphere. Today, however, Mars is desolate, cold and dry. So what happened to all the water?