BOULDER, Colorado – An innovative NASA Mars Orbiter is moving into the development stage.
The mission is NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN for short. It will probe the past climate of Mars, including its potential for harboring life over the ages.
MAVEN’s liftoff is slated for November 2013.
Led by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), MAVEN will carry three instrument suites to probe the atmosphere of Mars and its interactions with the Sun, notes LASP Associate Director Bruce Jakosky, principal investigator on the mission.
CU-Boulder’s LASP team also will provide science operations, build two of the science instruments and lead education and public outreach efforts for the MAVEN mission.
Plug a major information hole
According to Jakosky, a better understanding of the upper atmosphere of Mars — and the loss of volatile compounds like carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and water to space — is a must requirement to plug a major hole in our understanding of the red planet.
Mars is believed to once have sported a denser atmosphere that supported the presence of liquid water on the planet’s surface. Since most of the atmosphere was lost as part of a dramatic climate change, MAVEN will make definitive scientific measurements of present-day atmospheric loss that will offer insight into the red planet’s history.
Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colo., is building MAVEN based on designs from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and 2001 Mars Odyssey missions as well as perform mission operations. The University of California-Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory also will build instruments for the mission and support education and public outreach efforts.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will provide navigation support, the Deep Space Network, and telecommunications relay hardware outfitted on the spacecraft.
Want more information on MAVEN?
Visit this website:
http://science.nasa.gov/missions/maven/
By LD/CSE