On Saturday, June 17, NASA鈥檚 MAVEN mission to Mars led by CU听Boulder will hit a happy milestone: 1,000 days of orbiting the Red Planet.
Since its launch in November 2013 and its orbit insertion in September 2014, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) has been exploring the upper atmosphere of Mars, said CU Boulder Professor Bruce Jakosky, principal investigator of the mission. MAVEN is bringing insight into how the sun stripped Mars of most of its atmosphere, turning a planet once possibly habitable to microbial life into a barren desert world.
鈥淢AVEN has made tremendous discoveries about the Mars upper atmosphere and how it interacts with the sun and the solar wind,鈥� said Jakosky, associate director of the 听at CU Boulder. 鈥淭hese are allowing us to understand not just the behavior of the atmosphere today, but how the atmosphere has changed through time.鈥�
During its 1,000 days in orbit, MAVEN has made a multitude of exciting discoveries. Here is a countdown of the top 10 discoveries from the mission:
10. Imaging of the distribution of gaseous nitric oxide and ozone in the atmosphere , indicating there are dynamical processes of exchange of gas between the lower and upper atmosphere that are not understood at present.
9. Some , rather than being diverted around the planet by the Martian ionosphere; this penetration is allowed by chemical reactions in the ionosphere that turn the charged particles of the solar wind into neutral atoms that are then able to penetrate deeply.
8. MAVEN made the , resulting from incoming interplanetary dust hitting the atmosphere. This layer is always present, but was enhanced dramatically by the close passage to Mars of Comet Siding Spring in October 2014.
7. MAVEN has , termed 鈥渄iffuse鈥� and 鈥減roton鈥� aurora; unlike how we think of most aurorae on Earth, these aurorae are unrelated to either a global or local magnetic field.
6. These aurorae are . When particles from these storms hit the Martian atmosphere, they also can increase the rate of loss of gas to space, by a factor of ten or more.
5. The interactions between the solar wind and the planet are unexpectedly complex.听 This results due to the lack of an intrinsic Martian magnetic field and the occurrence of small regions of magnetized crust that can affect the incoming solar wind on local and regional scales. The magnetosphere that results from the interactions varies on short timescales and is remarkably 鈥渓umpy鈥� as a result.
4. MAVEN confirming that it varies by a factor of 10 throughout the year. The source of the hydrogen ultimately is water in the lower atmosphere, broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen by sunlight. This variation is unexpected and, as yet, not well understood.
3. MAVEN has used measurements of the isotopes in the upper atmosphere (atoms of the same composition but having different mass) to determine how much gas has been lost through time. These measurements .
2. MAVEN has measured the rate at which the sun and the solar wind are today, along with the details of the removal processes. Extrapolation of the loss rates into the ancient past鈥攚hen the solar ultraviolet light and the solar wind were more intense鈥攊ndicates that large amounts of gas have been lost to space through time.
1. The Mars atmosphere has been , changing the climate from a warmer and wetter environment early in history to the cold, dry climate that we see today.
鈥淲e鈥檙e excited that MAVEN is continuing its observations,鈥� said Gina DiBraccio, MAVEN project scientist from NASA鈥檚 Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. 鈥淚t鈥檚 now observing a second Martian year, and looking at the ways that the seasonal cycles and the solar cycle affect the system.鈥�
MAVEN began its primary science mission on November 2014 and is the first spacecraft dedicated to understanding Mars鈥� upper atmosphere. The goal of the mission is to determine the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time. MAVEN is studying the entire region from the top of the upper atmosphere all the way down to the lower atmosphere so that the connections between these regions can be understood.
鈥淥ne of the exciting aspects of MAVEN is that we鈥檙e able to involve a lot of CU Boulder students in the project,鈥� said Jakosky, also a faculty member in the 鈥淲e have both undergraduate and graduate students working on science data analysis, mission planning and instrument operations.鈥�
CU Boulder鈥檚 LASP provided two science instruments for the mission and leads science operations, education and public outreach. NASA鈥檚 Goddard Space Flight Center manages the MAVEN project and provided two science instruments for the mission. Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations.
The University of California at Berkeley鈥檚 Space Sciences Laboratory also provided four science instruments for the mission. NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, provides navigation and Deep Space Network support, as well as the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
for more information about the MAVEN mission.
