The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with Nasa’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft rolls out of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex to the launch pad.
CAPE CANAVERAL: Nasa hopes its newest Mars spacecraft lives up to its know-it-all name.
The robotic explorer called Maven is due to blast off tomorrow on a 10-month journey to the red planet. There, it will orbit Mars and study the atmosphere to try to understand how the planet morphed from warm and wet to cold and dry.
“A maven is a trusted expert,” noted Nasa’s space science chief, John Grunsfeld. Maven will help scientists “build a story of the Mars atmosphere and help future human explorers who journey to Mars.”
The $671m mission is Nasa’s 21st crack at Earth’s most enticing neighbour, coming on the heels of the Curiosity rover, still rolling strong a year after its grand Martian arrival.
When Maven reaches Mars next September, it will join three functioning spacecraft, two US and one European. An Indian orbiter also will be arriving about the same time. Maven will be the 10th orbiter to be launched to Mars by Nasa; three have failed, testimony to the difficulty of
the task.
“No other planet, other than perhaps Earth, has held the attention of people around the world than Mars,” Grunsfeld said.
Early Mars had an atmosphere thick enough to hold water and moist clouds, said chief investigator Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder. Indeed, water flowed once upon a time on Mars, and microbial life might have existed.
“But somehow that atmosphere changed over time to the cold, dry environment that we see today,” Jakosky said. “What we don’t know is what the driver of that change has been.”
Maven — short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, with a capital N in EvolutioN — is the first spacecraft devoted entirely to studying Mars’ upper atmosphere. India’s orbiter will also study the atmosphere but go a step further, seeking out methane, a possible indicator of life.
Scientists theorise that some of the early atmospheric water and carbon dioxide went down into the crust of the Martian surface — there is evidence of carbonate minerals on Mars. Gases also may have gone up and become lost to space, stripped away by the sun, molecule by molecule, Jakosky said.
Maven holds eight scientific instruments to measure the upper atmosphere for an entire Earth year — half a Martian year. The boxy, solar-winged craft — as long as a school bus and as hefty as a 5,400-pound SUV — will dip as low as 78 miles above the surface for atmospheric sampling, and its orbit will stretch as high as 3,864 miles.
AP
