Earlier this year, over the course of a few weeks in late February and early March, a team of MAVEN researchers observed a “major interplanetary disturbance,” prompted by one of the most dramatic solar storms recorded in the past decade. The coronal mass ejections that take place during this kind of solar storm are so strong they can make the entire surface of the sun appear to ripple. Here’s a video from the Solar Dynamics Observatory of one significant solar flare that occurred at the time:

And here’s a look at the size of our planet compared with the magnitude of a particularly powerful solar flare that was observed on March 11, 2015, and given the X-class designation, reserved for the most intense solar flares:

It was days after that flare when planetary scientists first noticed a surprisingly bright, ultraviolet aurora glowing deep in the Martian atmosphere, “a new kind of aurora was observed at Mars that, frankly, surprised us,” said Dave Brain, a MAVEN co-investigator. This storm, Brain and his colleagues would later learn, didn’t just create a strange aurora. It drastically altered the overall structure and flow of the magnetosphere on Mars and had a “major impact” on the upper atmosphere, too.

Normally, when Mars isn’t being blasted by solar wind, “there are roughly 100 grams of atmosphere escaping every second, or about a quarter-pound of atmosphere escaping every second,” said Brain. (“I can’t help but imagine hamburgers flying out of the Martian atmosphere, one per second,” he added.)

During a solar storm, the new data shows, atmospheric escape rates go up by a factor of 10 to 20 at least. MAVEN's work represented the most comprehensive mapping of ion loss on the planet to date.

The findings, which researchers detailed in Science on Thursday, also suggest that solar winds play a major role in atmospheric loss on Mars. Scientists believe much higher escape-rates early in Mars’s history were dominated by storm events. Which means that by observing the way that ions flood out of Mars’s upper atmosphere before and after the solar storm in March, scientists believe they are able to piece together how Mars lost so much of its atmosphere.

Another new paper from MAVEN researchers focuses on the new kind of auroral display identified on Mars.

This new aurora is similar to Earth’s Northern Lights in some ways, but powered by a different mechanism, scientists found. While both kinds of auroras involve accelerated particles along electromagnetic fields, Earth’s auroras are driven by the magnetism of the planets poles, whereas the aurora observed on Mars seems to be driven at least in part by remnant magnetism of the planet’s crust. (Other areas of magnetism on the Red Planet are associated with solar-wind fields, magnetic plasma that gets draped around Mars, and changes location around the planet over time.) The effect is a light show that spans a much wider area on Mars. “Diffuse auroras on Mars could therefore occur practically anywhere, and potentially nearly everywhere, on the planet,” researchers wrote in their paper.