"Mars went through a major transformation billions of years ago," says Al Matroushi. "And understanding such processes of how past Mars became present Mars is important. Because we want to understand what happened to our planet, because there are some similarities between us. I wouldn"t say like we"re exactly the same – for example, we do have a great magnetic field that is protecting us from the Sun, Mars doesn"t have that. It doesn"t have the protection that we do. So that could contribute to why such drastic changes happen."