NASA researchers have made a groundbreaking discovery about the fate of Mars’ water. Mars was once rich with flowing water, but today it is a cold, dusty desert marked by dried riverbeds and empty lake basins. While some of this water is now locked deep underground, the fate of the rest has remained a mystery until now.
NASA researcher John Clarke is leading the charge to uncover what happened to Mars’ missing water. His team has focused on two possible outcomes: some water likely froze into the ground. At the same time, the rest may have broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen, with the light hydrogen atoms escaping into space. To test this, Clarke’s team uses the Hubble Space Telescope and the MAVEN mission to observe as hydrogen drifts away from the Martian atmosphere.
These real-time measurements show how quickly hydrogen is disappearing today, allowing scientists to estimate how much water has been lost. On Mars, sunlight breaks apart water molecules in the atmosphere into hydrogen and oxygen atoms through a process known as photodissociation. This releases regular hydrogen and a heavier isotope called deuterium.
Due to its increased mass, deuterium escapes Mars’ atmosphere more slowly than hydrogen.
Mars’ water escape dynamics
Over time, more hydrogen escapes than deuterium, leading to a higher ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in the atmosphere.
Measuring this ratio allows scientists to estimate how much water was once present on the Red Planet. Clarke’s team has found that Mars’ atmosphere is far more dynamic than previously thought. In recent years, scientists have found that Mars has a much more dynamic annual cycle than people expected 10 or 15 years ago,” Clarke notes.
The atmosphere heats up and cools down rapidly, influenced by Mars’ elliptical orbit around the Sun. When Mars is closer to the Sun, water molecules rise through the atmosphere much more quickly than expected, releasing hydrogen and deuterium at high altitudes. The rapid fluctuations in escape rates suggest that these atoms need additional energy to escape Mars’ gravity.
The study of Mars’ water history is critical for understanding the Red Planet and other Earth-sized planets in distant star systems. By examining Mars’ past, scientists hope to gain insights into the conditions that allow liquid water, and potentially life, to exist on distant planets. Clarke’s work, along with the data from Hubble and MAVEN, is helping to piece together the puzzle of water loss on Mars, a crucial step toward understanding the history of water in our solar system and beyond.
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