Hubble Helps Solve The Mystery of Mars’ Escaping Water

Mars was once a very wet planet. Scientists know that over the last 3 billion years, some of the water went underground, but what happened to the rest?

Now, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission are helping unlock that mystery. To understand how much water there was and what happened to it, scientists need to understand how the atoms escape into space.

A team combined data from Hubble and MAVEN to measure the current rate of these atoms escaping into space. This information allowed them to extrapolate the escape rate backwards through time to understand the history of water on the Red Planet.