SKY_September2014.pdf

20 September 2014 sky & telescope

Winged Time Traveler

Deciphering

H. G. Wells’s time machine has nothing on NASA’s

latest Mars mission. The Mars Atmosphere and Vola-

tile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) is a fl ying laboratory,

a nimble orbiter that will reach its target planet this

September. But don’t be fooled by its 2014 arrival: its

team intends to travel back in time and uncover what

happened in the Red Planet’s ancient past.

This spacecraft is the fi rst dedicated to directly

sampling Mars’s upper atmosphere from orbit.

Unlike previous Mars missions, MAVEN doesn’t

carry a visible-light camera. But this batlike craft will

give astronomers an unrivaled look at Mars’s current

atmosphere and how the planet has been losing

its atmosphere over time. These atmospheric data

should in turn help answer the two questions that

mystify anyone who looks at the long-gone water-

ways on this bleak, frigid world: was ancient Mars

ever habitable, and if so, what went wrong?

NASA’s new mission to the

Red Planet will help reveal

why our neighboring world

went red and dead.

CAMILLE M. CARLISLE

Maven_at_Mars.indd 20 6/23/14 12:17 PM