Watch Mars Dry Up in the Wake of a Massive Solar Eruption [VIDEO]

It's CME week for NASA, and that means the space agency will be pumping out a lot of amazing imagery for the public. That includes a stunning video that shows what Mars may have looked like as it transformed from a watery vista to the desolate and cold planet we see today. One theory even suggests that intense CMEs helped cause this drastic change - a theory that may not be wrong.

The theory goes that a constant stream of solar wind coupled with several disastrous coronal mass ejections helped tear a protective atmosphere no different than the Earth's away from the Red Planet billions of years ago.

Our Sun is thought to be about five billion years old - that's about middle-age for a star as large and dense as ours. But like any child, the Sun was once far more active, erratic, and even dangerous. Our young Sun is thought to have frequently - perhaps even daily - blasted out intense bursts of radiation that are rare in modern times.

The Earth was likely still too young to have heavily suffered from these solar blasts, forming a proper protective atmospheric coat and magnetic field long after the Sun calmed down. However, Mars may not have been so lucky. (Scroll to read on...)

[Credit: NASA Goddard Conceptual Image Lab/Michael Lentz]

We can see how powerful even modern CMEs and other solar activity is thanks to leaps in NASA technology, especially within the last decade.

"Over the past ten years, we have had a major breakthrough in understanding space weather," Antti Pulkkinen, a space weather scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, explained in a recent statement. "We can now track the basic properties of CMEs. When our solar observatories see a CME, we can tell what direction it's going in and how fast it's traveling."

With the study of solar weather conditions still being a relatively young science, it has been pretty hard for experts to confirm or debunk the Martian CME theory.

However, that all may change very soon. According to NASA, the new the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution satellite, called MAVEN, will be able to closely observe what kind of effect modern CMEs and solar storms have on what remains of the Red Planet's atmosphere, potentially providing new hints to the mystery of Mars's sudden death.

"NASA also cares about CMEs at Mars for another reason: These giant clouds of speeding solar material can impact computers aboard spacecraft and expose astronauts to dangerous radiation," the agency added. "We must understand such space weather events before sending humans to take their first step on this planet that still holds so many secrets."