This is John Batchel, a conversation with my good colleague Bob Zimmerman about the atmosphere of Mars.

It's thin. Where did it go if it had an atmosphere once upon a time? Bob explains the contradictions and the mystery.

They are working on a theory of where the atmosphere could have gone. Much more needs to be learned. But if there was an

atmosphere, does that mean there can be another one? Why did it go away? Mars is approximately the same

age as Earth for a billion years. There's a theory that it's the shell of a planet. It didn't

quite form. But then again, I don't see all of this coming together yet.

Mars becomes important because it's an ambition for certain space engineers here in the

21st century, and we can believe it will be more so in the 22nd century, a colony away from

Earth and the Moon.

Bob Zimmerman on the atmosphere of Mars that isn't and where did it go and what explains it and what is to be done. Much more of this later. The theory is that because they think liquid water

once flowed on the surface of Mars based on what visually looks geologically water-created

geology, scientists believe the atmosphere was once much thicker and warmer. And so one of the

satellites sent to Mars is called Maven. It's been there for about a decade. It's been trying to figure

out how Mars lost its atmosphere based on this

theory.

And it now says it thinks it's detected the actual atomic process that caused this atmosphere

to escape away.

And they call it sputtering.

And they had to use three different

instruments on maven and then gathered data they said for about a decade

they expected actually to find this that find this process sputtering pretty

relatively quick it took instead a decade now there's a lot of uncertainty here we

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