Solar storms strip the Martian atmosphere into space

Mars was once a world of liquid water and potential habitability, but it has spent billions of years slowly leaking its atmosphere into the void. NASA's MAVEN spacecraft spent eleven years orbiting the Red Planet to witness this erosion in real time. It discovered that the solar wind, a constant stream of charged particles from the Sun, acts like an invisible abrasive, stripping away the gases that once kept the planet warm.