Live coverage: NASA confirms successful first flight of Mars helicopter

The solar wind, the million-mile-per-hour stream of charged particles blasted away from the sun, is slowly but surely stripping away Mars’ atmosphere and likely played a major role in turning the red planet from a habitable world in the distant past into the dry, frozen wasteland seen today, scientists said Thursday.

After two of the last three Vega rocket launches ended in failure, Arianespace launched another Vega launcher from French Guiana at 9:50 p.m. EDT Wednesday (0150 GMT Thursday) with Airbus’s Pléiades Neo 3 commercial Earth observation satellite and five secondary payloads.

If you look at the night sky this month, chances are you can’t miss Mars rising in the east like an orange beacon each evening. Scientists recently aimed the Hubble Space Telescope at the red planet, producing a dazzling image of bright Martian ice caps, rust-colored landscapes and clouds hanging in its rarefied atmosphere.