Published: 08 Nov 2013
Title: What Happened To Mars? A Planetary Mystery
Duration: 4:29
YouTube Link: http://youtu.be/etL2ZhqGNCs
Mars was once on track to become a thriving Earth-like planet, yet today it is an apparently lifeless wasteland. A NASA spacecraft named MAVEN will soon journey to Mars to find out what went wrong on the Red Planet.

Published: 22 May 2013
Title The MAVEN Magnetometer
Duration: 2:32
YouTube Link: http://youtu.be/aVPgxNUNHGk

MAVEN âs dual magnetometers will allow scientists to study the interaction between the solar wind and the Martian atmosphere, giving us a better understanding of how Mars has evolved from a warm, wet climate to the cold, arid one we see today.

Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) is a planned space probe designed to study the Martian atmosphere while orbiting Mars. One of the stated mission goals is to possibly determine what caused atmospheric Martian water to be lost to space over time.

If successfully launched on the first day of the launch window, November 18, 2013, MAVEN will be inserted on September 22, 2014 into an elliptic orbit 6,200 km (3,900 mi) by 150 km (93 mi) above the planet's surface. The principal investigator for the spacecraft is Bruce Jakosky of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Features on Mars resembling dry riverbeds and the discovery of minerals that form in the presence of water indicate that Mars once had a thicker atmosphere and was warm enough for liquid water to flow on the surface. However, that thick atmosphere was somehow lost to space. Scientists suspect that over millions of years, Mars lost 99% of its atmosphere as the planet’s core cooled and its magnetic field decayed, allowing the solar wind to sweep away most of the water and volatile compounds the atmosphere once contained.

The goal of MAVEN is to determine the history of the loss of atmospheric gases to space, providing answers about Martian climate evolution. By measuring the rate with which the atmosphere is currently escaping to space and gathering enough information about the relevant processes, scientists will be able to infer how the planet's atmosphere evolved over time. MAVEN will have four primary scientific objectives:

1 - Determine the role that loss of volatiles to space from the Mars atmosphere has played through time.

2 - Determine the current state of the upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and interactions with the solar wind.

3 - Determine the current rates of escape of neutral gases and ions to space and the processes controlling them.

4 - Determine the ratios of stable isotopes in the Martian atmosphere.

MAVEN is expected to reach Mars in September 2014. By then, the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite on board the Curiosity rover will have made similar surface measurements from Gale crater, which will help guide the interpretation of MAVEN's upper atmosphere measurements. MAVEN's measurements will also provide additional scientific context with which to test models for current methane formation in Mars.