mars_alive

If MAVEN does establish that Mars lost its atmosphere via the solar wind, how might that inform future missions, e.g. Mars Sample Return?

You said that you were going to 'do our best to count all the particles escaping from the planet at any given moment in space and time and then add that all up and see if it makes enough escaping atmosphere over 4 billion years', but isn't there a risk of a large margin of error if you just extrapolate from the escape rate today? Doesn't it depend on the strength of the magnetic field and also the behaviour of the solar wind over Mars' history?