NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft arrived at Mars and entered its orbit roughly three weeks ago, and it has now provided scientists their first look at the Red Planet's upper atmosphere.
MAVEN launched in November 2013 on a mission to help solve the mystery of how the Red Planet lost most of its atmosphere. The craft's scientific instruments have been fully calibrated in preparation for its first day officially on the job, and already scientists have received unprecedented views from its Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS). This includes ultraviolet images of the atmospheric oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon coronas surrounding the Red Planet, as well as a comprehensive map of highly variable ozone underlying the coronas.
"All the instruments are showing data quality that is better than anticipated at this early stage of the mission," Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in a NASA news release. "It really looks as if we're headed for an exciting science mission."
MAVEN is scheduled for an additional two weeks of instrument calibration and testing before it dives into its main mission, to begin in mid-November.
According to Spaceflight Insider, Mars' atmosphere was presumably not so different from ours at one point in time. Scientists believe that a few billion years ago, Mars harbored a thicker atmosphere that had all the conditions necessary for life. However, some unknown force caused its atmosphere to thin out, making it what it is today, and scientists are using MAVEN to try to figure out what that was. This, in turn, could foreshadow the future of Earth's own atmosphere.
Solar energetic particles (SEPs), for example - streams of high-speed particles blasted from the sun during explosive solar activity - are thought to be one possible mechanism for driving atmospheric loss.
Meanwhile, the hydrogen and oxygen coronas located on the Martian atmosphere's outer edge control the climate, and may provide insight into how the Red Planet has changed over the last four billion years, in terms of the warm and wet climate to the cold, dry climate we see today.
"With these observations, MAVEN's IUVS has obtained the most complete picture of the extended Martian upper atmosphere ever made," said MAVEN remote sensing team member Mike Chaffin.
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