BEIJING, Jan 26. (Xinhuanet) -- New measurements show the solar wind, rather than the sun, blows away the water on Mars, scientists of Sweden and France wrote in the journal Science Friday.

    The dusty red Mars was once covered with lakes, oceans and perhaps rivers, they discovered. 

    Though water flows relatively recently on its surface, the European scientists have been trying to find out where all the water on Mars goes and ruled out the sun as the culprit.

    They found ions -- charged particles -- being blown off the planet, not by the sun, but by the solar wind, itself a stream of charged particles.

    The scientists have used a special instrument aboard the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbitor to measure the loss of water.

    "We have measured the current loss rate due to the solar wind interaction," they wrote.

    During the year of their measurement, they found very little oxygen or carbon dioxide was blown off the Mars. Therefore, they will continue to investigate other escape channels. One other idea, they wrote, is an asteroid or some other large object hit Mars in the distant past and literally knocked off its atmosphere and large bodies of water.