Washington, Nov 5 (EFE).– The atmosphere of Mars could have disappeared billions of years ago as a result of the solar wind, which hits the planet with great strength, a situation that would explain how it lost the water that once covered its northern hemisphere, NASA reported Thursday.

New information gathered by NASA’s MAVEN probe, which is orbiting the Red Planet, indicates that Mars was repeatedly bombarded by solar particles that eroded the upper atmosphere at a rate of about 10 pounds per second, a factor that is between 10 and 20 times greater than the normal rate and which would be enough to strip away the atmosphere in a few billion years.

“What this tells us is loss through space has been an important process,” Bruce M. Jakosky, a scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado and the main investigator for the $671 million MAVEN mission, said at a Washington press conference.

According to NASA scientists, billions of years ago the Sun was more active and unstable, experiencing many solar storms that could have been the reason why Mars – which is much more vulnerable to these phenomena than Earth because it lacks our planet’s global magnetic field, which deflects the solar wind – went from being a warm, wet planet to the cold and virtually airless desert it is today.

The MAVEN probe, launched on Nov. 18, 2013, to resolve the mystery of how Mars lost most of its atmosphere and water, entered into orbit around the fourth planet from the Sun in September 2014 and has been gathering data ever since.

The MAVEN data augment the information being gathered by the Curiosity robot explorer on the planet’s surface, which found that three-mile-high Mt. Sharp inside Gale Crater, could have been formed by sediments deposited on the bed of a lake or ocean many millions of years ago. EFE