Author Topic: NASA Spacecraft Launching Monday Will Probe Mars Atmosphere Mystery  (Read 1059 times)

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NASA Spacecraft Launching Monday Will Probe Mars Atmosphere Mystery
SPACE.com
By Mike Wall, Senior Writer  3 hours ago



This artist's conception shows the NASA's MAVEN spacecraft orbiting Mars. The mission will launch in late 2013.



NASA's newest Mars probe is set to launch Monday (Nov. 18), on a mission to help figure out how the Red Planet shifted from a warm and wet world long ago to the cold, dry place we know today.

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN spacecraft, or MAVEN for short, is scheduled to lift off atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Monday at 1:28 p.m. EST (1828 GMT). After a 10-month cruise through deep space, MAVEN will start studying the Red Planet from orbit, seeking clues about how Mars lost most of its atmosphere in the ancient past. You can watch the launch live on SPACE.com via NASA TV beginning at 11 a.m. EST (1400 GMT).

"MAVEN will begin to look at those processes that tell us what happened to Mars' atmosphere, and why Mars perhaps underwent a major climate change in its past," Jim Green, head of NASA's planetary science division, told reporters in a prelaunch briefing late last month.


Mars mystery beckons

Billions of years ago, Mars was a relatively warm planet with a thick atmosphere and large amounts of surface water. Indeed, NASA's 1-ton Curiosity rover found evidence earlier this year that a spot near its landing site could have supported microbial life in the ancient past.

But then things changed. Mars lost the vast majority of its atmosphere to space, leaving the planet with a shell of air just 1 percent as thick as Earth's atmosphere. Mars cooled down and the surface water vanished, making the Red Planet much less hospitable for life as we know it.

Exactly how this happened remains a mystery, and scientists hope the $671 million MAVEN mission can help solve it.



Inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, engineers prepare the MAVEN spacecraft


In September 2014, MAVEN will insert into a highly elliptical orbit that brings it as close as 93 miles (150 kilometers) to the Martian surface and takes it as far away as 3,728 miles (6,000 km). The solar-powered probe will thus be able to sample the Red Planet's upper atmosphere directly and also get a global view of Mars' air on each 4.5-hour pass.

Over the course of one Earth year, MAVEN will use its eight science instruments to study the Red Planet's upper atmosphere and the solar wind, the stream of charged particles from the sun that may have stripped Marsof most of its air.

"The MAVEN spacecraft will make measurements in all regions of 'near-Mars' space," NASA officials wrote in a fact sheet about the mission. "These measurements will allow scientists to characterize the current state of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere, determine the rates of loss of gas to space today and extrapolate backward in time in order to determine the total loss to space through time."


Not hunting for life

While MAVEN's observations should improve scientists' understanding of Mars' past and present potential to host life, the probe won't actively seek signs of Red Planet organisms.

For example, MAVEN cannot sniff the air for methane, a gas that could be evidence of possible Martian lifeforms. (About 90 percent of the methane in Earth's atmosphere is biologically derived.)

"We just had to leave that one off to stay focused and to stay within the available resources," MAVEN principal investigator Bruce Jakosky, of the University of Colorado, Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, said during last month's press conference.

MAVEN may also help serve as a communications relay between NASA's two operational Mars rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity. This job is currently handled by two venerable space agency orbiters, Mars Odyssey (which launched in 2001) and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (which blasted off in 2005).

Unless something goes wrong with Odyssey or MRO — which are both in good health at the moment — MAVEN will be viewed primarily as a communications backup, at least during its one-year prime science mission, NASA officials have said.

MAVEN's launch window officially extends from Monday through Dec. 7. However, Jakosky has said that the spacecraft could actually blast off as late as Dec. 15 without any serious effects on the mission. After that date, MAVEN would have to wait 26 months for the next favorable alignment of Earth and Mars.

Find the latest MAVEN news, photos and videos on SPACE.com. You can also follow MAVEN coverage through the Mission Status Center at SPACE.com's partner, Spaceflight Now.


http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-spacecraft-launching-monday-probe-mars-atmosphere-mystery-131354538.html

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Mars orbiter aims to crack mystery of planet's lost water
« Reply #1 on: November 17, 2013, 05:49:06 pm »
Mars orbiter aims to crack mystery of planet's lost water
Reuters
By Irene Klotz 2 hours ago



Mount Sharp, on Mars is pictured in this panorama made from a mosaic of images taken by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity released as a NASA handout image



CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Scientists have no doubts that oceans and rivers once pooled on the surface of Mars, but what happened to all that water is a long-standing mystery.

The prime suspect is the sun, which has been peeling away the planet's atmosphere, molecule by molecule, for billions of years.

Exactly how that happens is the goal of NASA's new Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, or MAVEN, which is scheduled for launch at 1:28 p.m. EST/1828 GMT on Monday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Upon arrival in September 2014, MAVEN will put itself into orbit around Mars and begin scrutinizing the thin layer of gases that remains in its skies.

"MAVEN is going to focus on trying to understand what the history of the atmosphere has been, how the climate has changed through time and how that has influenced the evolution of the surface and the potential habitability - at least by microbes - of Mars,' said lead scientist Bruce Jakosky, with the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Specifically, MAVEN will look at how much and what type of radiation is coming from the sun and other cosmic sources and how that impacts gases in Mars' upper atmosphere.

Scientists have glimpsed the process from data collected by Europe's Mars Express orbiter and NASA's Curiosity rover, but never had the opportunity to profile the atmosphere and space environment around Mars simultaneously.

"We'll get a window on what is happening now so we can try and look backward at the evidence locked in the rocks and put the whole story together about Martian history and how it came to be such a challenging environment," said Mars scientist Pan Conrad, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.


EARTH'S LOST TWIN?

The evidence for a warmer, wetter, more Earth-like Mars has been building for decades. Ancient rocks bear telltale chemical fingerprints of past interactions with water. The planet's surface is riddled with geologic features carved by water, such as channels, dried up riverbeds, lake deltas and other sedimentary deposits.

"The atmosphere must have been thicker for the planet to be warmer and wetter. The question is where did all that carbon dioxide and the water go?" Jakosky said.

There are two places the atmosphere could go: down into the ground or up into space.

Scientists know some of the planet's carbon dioxide ended up on the surface and joined with minerals in the crust. But so far, the ground inventory is not large enough to account for the early, thick atmosphere Mars would have needed to support water on its surface.

Instead, scientists suspect that most of the atmosphere was lost into space, a process that began about 4 billion years ago when the planet's protective magnetic field mysteriously turned off.

"If you have a global magnetic field, it causes the solar wind to stand off. It pushes it away so it isn't able to strip away atmosphere," Jakosky said.

Without a magnetic field, Mars became ripe pickings for solar and cosmic radiation, a process that continues today.

MAVEN's prime mission is expected to last one year, enough time for scientists to collect data during a variety of solar storms and other space weather events.

Afterward, MAVEN will remain in orbit for up to 10 years serving as a communications relay for Curiosity, a follow-on rover slated to launch in 2020 and a lander that is being designed to study the planet's deep interior.

If MAVEN is launched as planned on Monday, it is due to reach Mars on September 22 - two days before India's Mars Orbiter Mission, which launched on November 5. India's probe has been raising its orbit around Earth and should be in position on December 1 to begin the journey to Mars.

If weather or technical problems prevent Monday's launch, NASA has 20 days to get MAVEN off the ground while Earth and Mars are favorably aligned for the probe to reach Mars.


http://news.yahoo.com/mars-orbiter-aims-crack-mystery-planets-lost-water-144037933.html

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NASA's New Mars Orbiter to Study 'Critical Piece' of Martian Puzzle (Video)
« Reply #2 on: November 17, 2013, 09:09:26 pm »
NASA's New Mars Orbiter to Study 'Critical Piece' of Martian Puzzle (Video)
SPACE.com
By Miriam Kramer, Staff Writer  2 hours ago



This artist's concept shows the MAVEN spacecraft in orbit around the Red Planet, with a fanciful image of her home planet in the background.



NASA's next Mars probe is set to piece together longstanding mysteries about the atmosphere of the Red Planet.

Earlier robotic probes and rovers sent to Mars were designed to investigate the surface of the planet, but the space agency's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft (MAVEN) is built for a different target: the planet's atmosphere.

"The Martian atmosphere is a critical piece of the puzzle of how Mars works," Jim Garvin, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said. "Certainly Mars was born with a different atmosphere than we think we see today."

You can watch a video of Garvin discussing MAVEN and other Mars missions on SPACE.com

The MAVEN spacecraft is set to launch atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Monday (Nov. 18) at 1:28 p.m. EST (1828 GMT). You can watch the launch live on SPACE.com, via NASA TV, beginning at 11 a.m. EST (1400 GMT).

The $671 million MAVEN mission will study Mars' upper atmosphere to help scientists understand how the Red Planet lost its atmosphere over time. Scientists think that ancient Mars had a relatively thick atmosphere, but now it is only about 1 percent as thick as Earth's, scientists have said.

Scientists don't have a lot of information about Mars' atmosphere. "MAVEN is going to fill in a lot of the gaps that we've known we needed to fill in since the 1970s," Garvin said.

Today, Mars is cold and dry, but evidence suggests that the world was once rich with liquid water. Because Mars is smaller than Earth, its atmosphere is more tenuous, Garvin told SPACE.com.

The atmosphere of Mars was probably subject to harsh solar wind and other factors that could have caused Mars' atmosphere to escape, thinning over time. The Martian atmosphere was "space weathered" away, Garvin said.

By using MAVEN's extensive instrumentation, scientists can combine observations made by rovers on the planet's surface to understand how the atmosphere was lost to space as Mars evolved.

"We need to measure the atmosphere of Mars today, how it works, how it's lost to space, how it interacts with the solar wind, how that relates to the chemistry of the rocks on the surface that we're measuring with Curiosity, that we measured with Spirit and Opportunity," Garvin told SPACE.com. "All that is part of this big ensemble of information we need to really understand how Mars works."

MAVEN is the 10th orbiter launched to Mars by NASA. Currently, the space agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey and the European Space Agency's Mars Express are active spacecraft in orbit around Mars. The Mars rover Curiosity and Opportunity are both functioning on the surface of the planet.

"Mars is a big place and really, it's a rather tricky place. It has beguiled us ever since we sent our first spacecraft by the planet, and so, as we start to piece together the information to understand this world, a place where we can reasonably ask, 'Could there have been a record of past life?' We need to bring all the information together to pose that question in an informed way."

Find the latest MAVEN news, photos and videos on SPACE.com. You can also follow MAVEN coverage through SPACE.com's partner, Spaceflight Now.


http://news.yahoo.com/nasas-mars-orbiter-study-critical-piece-martian-puzzle-180105646.html

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NASA aims for Mars, with robotic Maven set to soar
« Reply #3 on: November 17, 2013, 09:16:36 pm »
NASA aims for Mars, with robotic Maven set to soar
Associated Press
By MARCIA DUNN 1 hour ago



CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA is headed back to Mars, this time with a robotic scout named Maven that will attempt to solve the mystery of the red planet's radical climate change.

Maven is scheduled to blast off aboard an unmanned rocket at 1:28 p.m. Monday.

___

FLIGHT TIME

The journey to Mars will take 10 months, putting Maven in orbit around the red planet in September 2014. The spacecraft will circle the red planet for a full Earth year, examining the upper atmosphere. It will dip as low as 78 miles above Mars to sample the atmosphere. Its orbit will extend as high as 3,864 miles.

___

PURPOSE

Scientists want to learn how Mars transformed from a warm, wet planet a few billion years ago to the dry, cold world of today. The atmosphere went from thick to thin. Much of the atmospheric gas may have escaped into space. The sun is the likely culprit.

___

COST

The Maven mission will cost $671 million over its entire lifetime. That includes the price of the unmanned Atlas V rocket used to launch the spacecraft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

___

MAVEN SPACECRAFT

When its solar wings are extended, Maven stretches 37.5 feet — about the length of a school bus. It weighs 5,410 pounds, the same weight as an SUV. Eight scientific instruments are on board, as well as communications relay equipment for use with Mars landers. Maven stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, with a capital "N'' at the end of EvolutioN. The idea for Maven dates back 10 years. Scientists hope to keep it going well beyond its advertised working lifetime of one Earth year. The project is led for NASA by the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder.

___

ABOUT MARS

Mars is the most similar planet to Earth in our solar system, with the greatest prospects of habitability for future astronauts. Mars is about half the size of Earth but has about the same land area. A Martian year lasts 687 Earth days.

___

MARS MISSIONS

Maven is NASA's 21st mission to Mars. Fourteen of the first 20 succeeded. The 1964 Mariner 4 was the first spacecraft to fly by the red planet. Curiosity was America's most recent Mars visitor, launching in 2011 and landing in 2012.

___

CHUGGING AWAY AT MARS

Three spacecraft currently are collecting data in orbit around Mars: NASA's 2001-launched Mars Odyssey, Europe's 2003-launched Mars Express and NASA's 2005-launched Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Two rovers are on the surface, still working: NASA's 2003-launched Opportunity and 2011-launched Curiosity.

___

FUTURE MARS SHOTS

NASA plans to launch a robotic geologist named InSight in 2016; the lander will penetrate the Martian surface with a seismometer and heat probe. The next NASA wheeled rover will fly in 2020, collecting rock samples for potential return to Earth. A human expedition is not anticipated until the 2030s.

___

Online:

NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/maven

University of Colorado: http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/


http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-aims-mars-robotic-maven-set-soar-195411663.html

 

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