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[music]

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upper atmosphere. If you imagine Mars as having had a thicker,

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warmer atmosphere earlier in its history, where did the atmosphere go? Where

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did the water go? And there are only two places it can go--the atmosphere can go down

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or it can go up and be lost to space. MAVEN is

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the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN Mission. We're trying to understand

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basically why the climate changed on Mars--why Mars appears

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to have gone from an environment that was habitable--to microorganisms,

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at least--to one that is the cold, dry, uninhabitable environment

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we see today. By looking at the nature of the upper

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atmosphere today, and how gases can be lost out of the atmosphere

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to space today, we learn about the processes that control the

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atmosphere, and we're gonna have a good understanding of what the history of

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the atmosphere has been. [music]

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[music]

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[beeping]