Martian dust storms parch the planet by driving water into space

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https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/martian-dust-storms-parch-planet-driving-water-space

Source: By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine. 

Excerpt: ...Martian dust storms are common, but every decade or so, for reasons unknown, a monstrous one goes global, veiling the planet. The storms can be a mortal threat to exploration: The one in 2018 killed off NASA’s Opportunity rover by coating its solar panels in dust. But now, researchers say the storms may also be one of the culprits in the ultimate martian cold case: how the once-wet planet lost its water. Fossilized rivers and deltas etched across Mars suggest water flowed there billions of years ago. Most of it must have somehow escaped to space—yet researchers thought water vapor could not travel high in the frigid, thin atmosphere without condensing into snow and falling back to the surface. New data from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter, published today in Science, show how churning dust storms may in effect pump water into space. “These escape processes are an effective way to make Mars dry,” says Anna Fedorova, a planetary scientist at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences....  See also the Maven Mission (NASA Goddard) MAVEN Infographic: Martian Dust Storms Accelerate Water Loss.

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