MAVEN Underway

MAVEN, NASA's latest Mars probe, is scheduled to launch today at 1328 EST from Cape Canaveral.  Here on the west coast of Florida, weather permitting, we can see the launch from a hundred miles away - a vertical stem of fire and smoke.  It's really cool.

MAVEN sits atop an Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral

But MAVEN - Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution - is NASA's latest foray into our on-going,  on-site study of Mars. It seeks to determine why Mars devolved from a warm moist planet with a dense atmosphere to a cold and barren, airless planet. The early Martian atmosphere was thick enough to hold water and possibly support life, but most of that atmosphere is gone, eroded by the sun, or lost from some other cause.  “Something clearly happened,” University of Colorado’s Bruce Jakosky, the principal Maven scientist, said. “What we want to do is to understand what are the reasons for that change  . . . .” Maven's journey will require a flight time of 10 months to reach Mars, entering into orbit around Mars in September 2014. Its eight scientific instruments will attempt to determine when and why Mars's atmosphere went missing.

The U.S. is not the only country exploring Mars.  MAVEN will join India's probe launched earlier this month.  Two years ago, China failed in a joint attempt with Russia to put its first Mars probe in orbit.  China now says it's likely to be five to seven years before they makes it to Mars. You can't discover the same things twice, China's National Space Science Center director, Wu Ji, points out, so China will pick up where the U.S. and India left off.

NASA has been sending probes to Mars since November 1964, when the agency launched the Mariner 3 spacecraft on an attempted Red Planet flyby. That mission failed, but Mariner 4, which blasted off just three weeks later, managed to beam home 21 up-close photos of Mars — the first pictures of another planet ever returned to Earth from deep space, and we've learned much about the Red Planet since then.  This will be NASA's 14th mission to Mars.