About Mars: My Facebook entry today

The Larousse Guide to Astronomy, 1980 edition, says in Mars' Hellas region, more than 3.5 billion years ago, it was hit and the crust was punctured by a meteoroid between 100 to 200 km in diameter.

If this entered the molten core, as it would by puncturing the crust, there would have been a fantastic explosion. This would probably have momentarily inflated the planet like a balloon from the inside, and thrown the original surface features off into space, while the extreme heat of the blast would incinerate the atmosphere, leaving only traces of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide behind. Which is all we have now for atmosphere.

Where did the missing surface features go? The sand, gravel and broken rocks are now called "The Asteroid Belt" comprising an estimated 20% of a planet's mass, and the oceans became those "dirty snowballs" we call Comets, some of whom lately have exhibited traces of sodium, as in salt, in their tail gases, suggesting to me possibly frozen sea water.

Mars today is without a magnetic field because that severe impact would have demagnetized it. And I'm surprised others don't seem able to "connect the dots" here. There's a reason for everything if we really look for it. And if every rock Curiosity has looked at so far is sedimentary, there must be a reason for the sudden disappearance of the oceans. It wasn't "magic". But it did begin with something whose first letter is 'M'.

And I'm not speaking of our Moon, although here's an interesting coincidence; our Moon has a density of 3.346 grams per cubic centimeter, while Mars' density is 3.93. Mercury = 5.43, Venus = 5.20 and Earth = 5.52. And that 5,000 km long "canyon" just below Mars' equator, if opened up into a circular hole, would be just about the right size for our Moon to pass through. Is all that just random coincidence? I don't think so.

If we could put back all those missing parts - the Moon, the 20% from the Asteroid Belt, and those oceans, and its atmosphere, we'd have a planet just about the same as Earth. And back then, both Mars and the Earth were probably closer to the sun. Earth once was tropical or semi-tropical almost all over, and Mars at that time was probably more comfortably within our habitable zone around the sun, rather than now being on the bitter outer edges of it. And that's my theory, Folks. So prove or disprove it, please.