A NASA Maven spacecraft entered Orbit around Mars Sunday, ending a 10-month journey and beginning a search for the planet's lost water, according to The Associated Press.
Maven, or the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, traveled 442 million miles and fired its six rocket thrusters to enter Mars' orbit, the AP reported.
The thrusting took 33 minutes and left MAVEN in Mars' gravity as it flew over the planet's north pole and slipped into a looping 236-mile by 27,713-mile high orbit, according to the AP. MAVEN will lower its altitude over the next several weeks until it reaches its 93-mile by 3,900-mile operational orbit
"I don't have any fingernails anymore, but we made it," Colleen Hartman, NASA deputy director for science at Goddard Space Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said during a NASA Television broadcast of MAVEN's arrival, the AP reported.
MAVEN will study how the solar wind strips away atoms and molecules in the planet's upper atmosphere, a process that scientists believe has been underway for eons, according to the AP.
"By learning the processes that are going on today we hope to extrapolate back and learn about the history of Mars," MAVEN scientist John Clarke, with Boston University, said in an interview on NASA Television, the AP reported.
The $671-million MAVEN mission is scheduled to last one year, according to the AP. The spacecraft joins two other NASA orbiters, two NASA rovers and a European orbiter currently working at Mars.
Scientists strongly suspect that Mars was not always the cold and dry desert it is today because the planet's surface is riddled with what appear to be dry riverbeds and minerals that form in the presence of water, according to the AP.
Mars' atmosphere is now about 100 times thinner than Earth's, and scientists suspect Mars lost 99 percent of its atmosphere over millions of years as the planet cooled and its magnetic field decayed, allowing charged particles in the solar wind to strip away water and other atmospheric gases, the AP reported.
