Is This How Planet Mars Lost Its Atmosphere? | NASA Goddard FriendsofNASA.org: Mars is losing its atmosphere. Over billions of years, the Red Planet has transformed from a potentially habitable world with lakes, rivers, and a thicker atmosphere into the cold, dry desert we see today. NASA’s MAVEN mission has been tracking this process in real time, catching Mars in the act of slowly sputtering its atmosphere into space. This phenomenon—called “atmospheric sputtering”—happens when high-energy par