Mars

Mars, A Post-Habitable Planet?

By Keith Cowing
Status Report
astro-ph.IM
May 27, 2026
Filed under , , , , ,
Mars, A Post-Habitable Planet?
This view of a crescent Mars was captured on May 15, 2026, at about 5:03 a.m. PDT by NASA’s Psyche mission as it approached the planet for a gravity assist. The image has been processed into a natural-color view using red, green, and blue data from the multispectral imager instrument. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Mars provides a critical analog to once habitable exoplanets that have since lost their surface liquid water.

The current atmospheric state of Mars retains the chemical fingerprints of that transition, including isotopic signatures of atmospheric escape and climate evolution.

As the closest accessible example of a terrestrial world with definitive evidence for once supporting liquid water on its surface, Mars presents a unique opportunity to test hypotheses about planetary habitability and atmospheric evolution in a spatially and temporally resolved way.

Matteo Crismani, Richard Cartwright, Michael Chaffin, Sara Faggi, Stephanie Milam, Geronimo Villanueva

Comments: Prepared for the Habitable Worlds Observatory 25 Proceedings, but not submitted in time. Posted here for posterity
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.26138 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2605.26138v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.26138
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Submission history
From: Matteo Crismani
[v1] Fri, 22 May 2026 05:52:00 UTC (560 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26138

Astrobiology,

Keith Cowing

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member 🖖🏻

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