Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) Mission:
NASA has lost contact with its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, the Mars orbiter that has worked for more than a decade to study how the planet’s atmosphere is escaping into space.
- It is the first spacecraft mission dedicated to surveying the upper atmosphere of Mars.
- It is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, an unprecedented, multi-decade campaign to comprehensively understand Mars and its suitability to host past or present life.
- It aims to understand the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate over time.
- It carries three packages of instruments.
- One package studies the solar wind and its impact on Mars’s ionosphere.
- The second package is an ultraviolet spectrometer that studies the upper atmosphere.
- The third package is a mass spectrometer that studies the composition of the upper atmosphere.
- MAVEN found that Mars lost about 2/3 of its early atmosphere to space.
