Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) Mission

Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) Mission Latest News

NASA has lost contact with its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, the Mars orbiter that has worked for more than a decade to study how the planet’s atmosphere is escaping into space.

About Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) Mission

• It is the first spacecraft mission dedicated to surveying the upper atmosphere of Mars.
• It is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, an unprecedented, multi-decade campaign to comprehensively understand Mars and its suitability to host past or present life. 
• It aims to understand the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate over time. 
• It was launched in November 2013 and arrived at Mars in September 2014.
• MAVEN orbits Mars every 3.5 hours and gets as close as 150 km to its surface.
• It carries three packages of instruments. 
  • One package studies the solar wind and its impact on Mars’s ionosphere. (Since Mars has no magnetic field, its atmosphere would be slowly removed by interaction with the solar wind.)
  • The second package is an ultraviolet spectrometer that studies the upper atmosphere.
  • The third package is a mass spectrometer that studies the composition of the upper atmosphere.
• MAVEN found that Mars lost about 2/3 of its early atmosphere to space.

Source: TH

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