NASA prepares 'key announcement' on history of the Red Planet

It is believed the protective covering could have sustained life many eons ago.

The announcement is the culmination of a ten-month exploration of the Red Planet's upper atmosphere and comes two months after Nasa's Curiosity Rover discovered the planet was home to water.

In 2013, NASA launched the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission to examine how solar winds penetrates the atmosphere and may lead to a loss of water and carbon dioxide into space.

The press conference will be charred by Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA headquarters, who announced the presence of water on Mars.

Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN's principle investigator, said: "We see evidence hat liquid water flowed over the surface early in history in a way that doesn't happen today.

"However, it's an open question as to whether there were, for example, global oceans, or whether the atmosphere was thick enough that it would have appeared blue.

"That's really part of the question that MAVEN is trying to answer."

MAVEN was launched in 2013 and entered Martian atmosphere in September 2014.

Janet Luhmann, MAVEN's deputy principal investigator, said: "The assumption is that what we observe today gives us a pretty good idea of what processes have been going on for the last three billion years.

"If Curiosity does the lower atmosphere, and we MAVEN can say something about escape into space, I'm hoping between the two we could fill in the puzzle."

(dailystar.co.uk)