MAVEN Probe Clears Last Pre-flight Review

NASA officials cleared its newest probe for launch Friday afternoon, just three days prior to the spacecraft's scheduled liftoff.

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter will take off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Monday aboard the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

The latest review marked the last one before its ride into space, with the Atlas V cleared for rollout to the launch pad Saturday.

According to NASA officials, teams have not come up against any technical issues or concerns regarding the launch. Meanwhile, forecasters from the US Air Force's 45th Weather Squadron are predicting a 60 percent chance of favorable conditions during the launch window just two hours wide.

"After 10 years of working on this, I can't tell you how excited I am to see this finished spacecraft ready to go," the mission's principal investigator Bruce Jakosky said in a statement.

MAVEN was designed with the specific purpose in mind of answering one looming question regarding the neighboring planet: what happened to Mars' atmosphere?

"Mars is a complicated system, just as complicated as the Earth in its own way," Jakosky said. "You can't hope, with a single spacecraft, to study all aspects and to learn everything there is to know about it. With MAVEN, we're exploring the single biggest unexplored piece of Mars so far."

The spacecraft is scheduled to reach its destination Sept. 22, 2014, at which point it will enter an elliptical orbit around the planet that will bring it as close as 93 miles to its surface and as far as 3,728 miles.

Assembled by Lockheed Martin, MAVEN boasts a trio of instrument suites to enable it to carry out its daunting task. These include the Particles and Fields Package, built by the University of California, Berkeley, the Remote Sensing Package, built by the University of Colorado, and the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"We're really excited," said David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at Goddard. "We're so close now. I mean, we're headed to Mars."