Earth, Mars and Venus all looked pretty similar when they first formed. Today, Mars is dry, cold, and dusty; Venus has a hot, crushing atmosphere. Why did these sibling planets turn out so different?
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That's not an exaggeration: Ten probes that have made it to the Venusian surface; none of them have lasted more than two hours. Venus experiences temperatures over 800 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures that are more than 75 times that of what we experience on Earth. "It's like Thanksgiving. You have a hot potato, you know, baked potato and you've got peas and you want to eat that potato, but it's too hot. But the peas, they're ready to go because they have radiated out their heat because they're small."Mars is a smaller potato, so it lost its heat faster. Venus and Earth were similarly sized spuds, so they should have cooled at the same rate.
While Mars started out similar to Venus and Earth, its smaller size meant that its gravity wasn't strong enough to hold onto the small amount of atmosphere it had developed when it had oceans in its early life. And as Mars cooled down its volcanic activity slowed down ... and eventually stopped. So Mars's atmosphere was slowly eaten away — becoming so thin that water could no longer remain liquid on the surface. Some of it escaped to space, and some of it ended up frozen in ice.
"Once you get rid of an ocean, you turn off the major mechanism to store carbon dioxide in rock," Gilmore says."And therefore, it just stays in the atmosphere. And the greenhouse effect takes over, and you get a super, super hot blanket."
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