One Step Closer to Solving the Mystery of Mars’ Lost Water

Few scientists doubt that Mars was once warm and wet. The evidence for a warm, watery past keeps accumulating, and even healthy skepticism can’t dismiss it. All this evidence begs the next question: what happened to it?

Mars bears the marks of a past when water flowed freely across its surface. There are clear river channels, lakes, and even shorelines. NASA’s Perseverance rover is working its way around Jezero Crater, an ancient paleolake, and finding minerals that can only form in water’s presence. MSL Curiosity has found the same in Gale Crater.

The water that created these landscape features is gone now. Some of it has retreated to the polar caps, where it remains frozen. But aside from that, there are only two places where the remainder of Mars’ ancient water could’ve gone: underground or into space.

Scientists think that there’s water under Mars’ surface. In 2018, researchers found evidence of a large subglacial lake about 1.5 km beneath the southern polar region, though these results have been met with some skepticism. Even if the lake is real, there’s nowhere near enough water there to account for all of Mars’ lost water.

In new research in Science Advances, a team of scientists using data from the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) orbiter explain how Mars lost much of its water to space. The research is “Martian atmospheric hydrogen and deuterium: Seasonal changes and paradigm for escape to space.” The lead author is John Clarke, a Professor of Astronomy and the Director of the Center for Space Physics at Boston University.

“Overall, the results presented here offer strong supporting evidence for a warm and wet period with an abundance of water on early Mars and a large amount of water loss into space over the lifetime of the planet.”

John Clarke, Director, Center for Space Physics at Boston University.

“There are only two places water can go. It can freeze into the ground, or the water molecule can break into atoms, and the atoms can escape from the top of the atmosphere into space,” explained Clarke in a press release. “To understand how much water there was and what happened to it, we need to understand how the atoms escape into space.”

The research focuses on two types of hydrogen: what we can call ‘regular’ hydrogen (H) and deuterium (D). Deuterium is hydrogen with a neutron in its nucleus. Water is H₂O—two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom—and water molecules can contain either hydrogen or deuterium. The neutron contributes additional mass and makes deuterium twice as heavy as hydrogen.

Ultraviolet light from the Sun can split water molecules apart into their constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms. In an escape-to-space scenario, more of the heavier deuterium is likely to be left behind than hydrogen.

As time passed on Mars and hydrogen kept escaping into space, more of the heavier deuterium was left behind. Over time, this preferential retention shifted the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium in the atmosphere. In this research, Clarke and his co-researchers used MAVEN to see how both atoms escape from Mars currently.

NASA launched MAVEN in 2013, and it reached Martian orbit in 2014. Since then, the capable spacecraft has been observing the Martian atmosphere, making it the first spacecraft dedicated to the task. Its overarching goal is to determine how Mars lost its atmosphere. One of its specific goals is to measure the rate of gas loss from the planet’s upper atmosphere to space and what factors and mechanisms govern the loss.

MAVEN’s instrument suite contains eight powerful instruments. However, every mission has its tradeoffs, and where MAVEN is concerned, it’s unable to monitor deuterium emissions throughout the entire Martian year. Mars’s orbit is more elliptical than Earth’s. During Martian winter, it travels further from the Sun compared to a circular orbit. During that period, the deuterium emissions are very faint.

This is where the Hubble Space Telescope comes in. It contributed observations from its two high spectral resolution UV instruments, the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). By combining the Hubble observations and the MAVEN data, Clarke and his team monitored deuterium escape for three complete Martian years.

Hubble also contributed data that predates the MAVEN mission. Hubble’s data is critical because the Sun drives the atmospheric escape, and its effect changes throughout the Martian year. The closer Mars is to the Sun, the more rapidly water molecules rise through the atmosphere, where they split apart at high altitudes.

The Sun’s effect on the Martian atmosphere is striking.

“In recent years scientists have found that Mars has an annual cycle that is much more dynamic than people expected 10 or 15 years ago,” explained Clarke. “The whole atmosphere is very turbulent, heating up and cooling down on short timescales, even down to hours. The atmosphere expands and contracts as the brightness of the Sun at Mars varies by 40 percent over the course of a Martian year.”

Prior to this research, Mars scientists thought that hydrogen and deuterium atoms slowly diffused upward through the thin atmosphere until they were high enough to escape. But these results change that perspective.

These results show that when Mars is close to the Sun, water molecules rise very rapidly and release their atoms at high altitudes.

“H atoms in the upper atmosphere are lost rapidly by thermal escape in all seasons, and the escape flux is limited by the amount diffusing upward from the lower atmosphere so that the escape flux effectively equals the upward flux,” the authors explain in their research.

It’s different for deuterium atoms, though. “The D escape flux from thermal escape is negligible, in which case an upward flux with the water-based D/H ratio would result in a large surplus of D in the upper atmosphere,” the authors write.

For the D/H ratio to be restored to the measured equilibrium with H near aphelion and to be consistent with observed faster changes in D density near perihelion, something has to boost the escape of D atoms. “In this scenario, the fractionation factor becomes much larger, consistent with a large primordial reservoir of water on Mars,” the authors write. “We consider this to be the likely scenario, while more work is needed to understand the physical processes responsible for superthermal atoms and their escape.”

“Overall, the results presented here offer strong supporting evidence for a warm and wet period with an abundance of water on early Mars and a large amount of water loss into space over the lifetime of the planet,” Clarke and his colleagues write.

The research also reached another conclusion. The upper Martian atmosphere is cold, so most of the atoms need a boost of energy to become superthermal and escape Mars’ gravity. This research shows that solar wind protons can enter the atmosphere and collide with atoms to provide the kick. Sunlight can also provide an energy boost through chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere.

This research doesn’t answer all of our questions about Mars’s lost water, but it makes significant progress, and that’s always welcome.

“The trends reported here represent substantial progress toward understanding the physical processes that govern the escape of hydrogen into space at Mars and our ability to relate these to the isotopic fractionation of D/H and the depth of primordial water on Mars,” the authors write.

How Mars lost its water is one of the big questions in space science right now. It’s about more than just Mars; it can help us understand Earth, Venus, and the rocky exoplanets we find in other habitable zones and how they evolve.

To put it bluntly, Mars lost its water, and Earth didn’t. Why?

We’re inching toward the answer.