Mars lost its atmosphere, Sun suspected

I wrote an article for Cosmos Magazine explaining how NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft detected streams of Martian air blasted away by the Solar Wind. This tiny trickle (100g / s) was seen to increase 10-15x during even a moderate Solar Storm (or Coronal Mass Ejection). As the Sun was more active when younger these slow and fast processes of stripping air from Mars could explain how the red planet was transformed from a water rich world 4bn years go into the barren desert it is today. Earth is protected from a similar fate thanks to our magnetic field but for reasons yet unknown the one on Mars failed.