NASA's MAVEN Mission is currently undergoing final preparations to explore the Martian atmosphere and is all set for its November 18 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Earlier this year, NASA announced its first mission that will explore Mar's atmosphere. The mission titled Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission (MAVEN) is scheduled for a November 18, 2013 launch. According to a recent press statement released by the space agency, the mission is undergoing final preparations and will launch on schedule at 1:28 p.m. EST from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The 5,410-pound spacecraft will launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket and will arrive on Mars September, 2014, after which it will settle into its elliptical science orbit.
"When we proposed and were selected to develop MAVEN back in 2008, we set our sights on Nov. 18, 2013, as our first launch opportunity," said Dave Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at Goddard. "Now we are poised to launch on that very day. That's quite an accomplishment by the team."
The mission will look into the processes by which the Red Planet lost most of its atmosphere. Analysis and data collected by the mission will shed more light of the planet's climatic history as well as help scientists better understand it's history of habitability.
"The MAVEN mission is a significant step toward unraveling the planetary puzzle about Mars' past and present environments," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The knowledge we gain will build on past and current missions examining Mars and will help inform future missions to send humans to Mars."
The MAVEN spacecraft will carry three instrument suites - The Particles and Fields Package, The Remote Sensing Package and The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer. The first will be used to understand the characteristics of the solar wind and the ionosphere of Mars. The second suite will be used to determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere while the third one will measure the composition of Mars' upper atmosphere.
The primary mission will last for one Earth year and during this time MAVEN will observe all of Mars' latitudes, ranging from 93 miles to more than 3,800 miles. During this time, the spacecraft will execute five deep dip manoeuvres, descending to an altitude of 78 miles. This marks the lower boundary of the planet's upper atmosphere.
Earlier, the U.S. government shut down posed a major hurdle for the missions as scientists worried that they would need to push back the launch of MAVEN to 2016. They first considered postponing the launch date to December 7, 2013 but if that was not possible they feared they would have to wait till 2016.
"We're concerned, obviously, but we've got margin in our schedule, and the team is absolutely committed to getting off at this launch opportunity," Bruce Jakosky, Maven's lead investigator told SPACE.com. "If that means working double shifts and working seven days a week, we'll do that."
This would have been a major blow to MAVEN's target cost, which is less than $485 million excluding the launch cost, which is roughly about $187 million. Fortunately, all went well and the agency is pleased they're able to launch the mission right on schedule.
Earlier in May, the agency also announced a contest wherein individuals could submit names and messages in the form of haiku (three line poetry) that they wanted to send to Mars. The messages would be carried in a DVD to Mars in NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft. This initiative was undertaken by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and was part of their "Going to Mars Campaign". The contest was coordinated at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP). Though the space agency's initial plan was to send only 3 haiku to the Red Planet, a new statement revealed that the University decided to send more than 1,100 haiku to Mars.
