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# Was There Water On Mars?

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<!-- video src="https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/D2PMM67Z.m3u8" -->
## Video: Was There Water On Mars?

[Watch (HLS stream): Was There Water On Mars?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/D2PMM67Z.m3u8) (2:12)

![Was There Water On Mars?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/D2PMM67Z/poster.jpg?width=720)

_Published 2013-11-16. Why did Mars lose its atmosphere and almost all of its water 3.7 billion years ago? The MAVEN spacecraft may bring us answers._


---

Jul 27, 2023 3:56 PM UTC

---

## More From This Series

[All Videos](https://time.com/video/)

[Mars May Have Far More Water Than We Thought](/video/gKfCXi5b/)

### Mars May Have Far More Water Than We Thought

[Know Right Now: Liquid Water Found on Mars](/video/de4CvA5e/)

### Know Right Now: Liquid Water Found on Mars

[Possible Water Flows on Mars](/video/VetpyTGh/)

### Possible Water Flows on Mars

---


## Transcript

[ MUSIC ]. Earth and Mars are both about 4. 5 billion years old, and both began as wet, even waterlogged places. But about 3. 7 billion years ago, Mars lost its atmosphere and when that happened it lost almost all of its water. The question is why and the answer may come from the MAVEN spacecraft, which NASA plans to launch on November 18th. [ MUSIC ]. Mars may have lost its atmosphere in several ways. The planet is not only smaller, but also less dense than Earth and as a result has only about 38 % of Earth's gravity. That makes it hard to hold on to air. Life may still have taken hold, at least in microbial form during the early years of Mars' existence, because life on earth is thought to have begun about 800 million years after its formation.

At that point in Mars' history. It was still warm and wet. Some of the upper reaches of Mars' atmosphere could simply have frittered away into space. And great gusts of it could have been lost early in the planet's life during what's known as the Great Heavy Bombardment period. But Mars' atmosphere was subjected to a more insidious force as well. The solar wind, the stream of charged particles that gush forth from the sun, would have interacted with the atmosphere and stripped much of it away through an entirely different process. Earth feels the solar wind too, but we have a magnetic field. Mars once had a weaker one, and even that eventually faded.

[ MUSIC ] The MAVEN spacecraft will fly an elliptical orbit around Mars. Sometimes dipping as low as 77 miles. And sometimes as high as about 3, 800 miles. That will allow it to get both a big picture look at the planet, and also an up- close sampling of its atmosphere. [ MUSIC ]

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