Venus today is dry thanks to water loss to space as atomic hydrogen. In the dominant loss process, an HCO+ ion recombines with an electron, producing speedy H atoms that use CO molecules as a launchpad to escape. Credit: Aurore Simonnet / Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics / University of Colorado Boulderloses significantly more water than previously thought due to a process called “dissociative recombination,” where hydrogen atoms escape into space.
Venus, she added, is positively parched. If you took all the water on Earth and spread it over the planet like jam on toast, you’d get a liquid layer roughly 3 kilometers deep. If you did the same thing on Venus, where all the water is trapped in the air, you’d wind up with only 3 centimeters , barely enough to get your toes wet.
For Cangi, co-lead author of the research, the findings reveal new hints about why Venus, which probably once looked almost identical to Earth, is all but unrecognizable today. “As an analogy, say I dumped out the water in my water bottle. There would still be a few droplets left,” Chaffin said. While dozens of missions have visited Mars in recent decades, far fewer spacecraft have traveled to the second planet from the sun. None have carried instruments capable of detecting the HCO+ that powers the team’s newly discovered escape route.
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