Water is life . This precious resource was crucial to the evolution of lifetime on Earth . In the distant past , fellow rocky planets Mars and Venus had plenty of water supply too , but they are now literally worlds apart . Venus is a pressurize acid blaze and Mars is a frigid , dry desert .
Now , researchers have take a closer look at their release of piss into space . Mars ' moisture is on a regular basis stripped from its atmosphere and lose to the depths of distance . On the other hand , Venus seems to be holding on to most of its original water .
As reported inScience , researchers have analyzed data from NASA ’s MAVEN spacecraft and found grounds that the water system in Mars ’ air is transported high into the atmosphere , where water molecules are destruct by other ions present in the line . The oxygen in the piss reacts with the ion , and the freed hydrogen is lose to space .
The squad was able to track this behavior seasonally to show that water copiousness top out during the southern summer . And more strikingly , dust storms like the one that killed NASA ’s rover Opportunity increase the atmospheric loss .
“ The seasonal and dust storm - mediated delivery of water to the upper ambience could have play a substantive role in the evolution of the Martian clime from its warm and wet state billions of years ago to the cold and dry planet we observe today , ” wrote the author in thepaper . “ Mars has in all probability lose enough H2O to cover the planet ’s airfoil with an sea tens to hundreds of meters bass , and red ink rates must have been eminent in the past . ”
On Venus , the billet seems to be rescind . Moa Persson from the Institute for Space Physics , IRF , and Umeå University has just completedher thesison the subject . Using datum from the European Space Agency ’s Venus Express , she was capable to estimate how much piss Venus has drop off over the last 4 billion days . The amount of hydrogen and oxygen lost to quad count on the volume of sunlight and the solar tip . According to Persson ’s research , Venus is lose water to space but it is less than previously thought .
Future missions to Venus might characterise the evolution of its atmosphere even better and mayhap reassert or deny the complex subject of itsphosphine .
