Tag Archives: Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph

MAVEN: Mapping atmosphere by watching stars set

High above the thin Martian skies, NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft is carrying out a mission: determine how Mars lost its early atmosphere, and with it, its water. While previous Mars orbiters have peered down at the planet’s surface, MAVEN is spending … Continue reading

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MAVEN: 3rd deep-dip campaign successful

To complete the third deep-dip of the mission, the MAVEN spacecraft executed a maneuver with a ∆V (change in velocity) of 3.9 m/sec. The final “walk out” maneuver resulted in a periapsis of 145 km above the surface of Mars, … Continue reading

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MAVEN: ‘Walk-out’ from deep-dip #3

After a very successful third deep-dip into the well-mixed portion of Mars’ atmosphere, the MAVEN spacecraft will be commanded to “walk-out” of the current atmospheric density corridor on its way to resuming normal science operations. Raising the periapsis from ~120 … Continue reading

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MAVEN: On track in deep-dip maneuver #3

Analysis by the MAVEN navigation team shows that the spacecraft is still within the targeted atmospheric deep-dip corridor. As a result, no maneuver has been made to adjust the location of the spacecraft within the corridor since the beginning of … Continue reading

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MAVEN begins third deep-dip campaign

The MAVEN spacecraft has successfully begun its third deep-dip campaign of the mission. On Tuesday, July 7th, the ‪‎MAVEN‬ navigation team executed a maneuver to lower periapsis by 24 km down to 123 km above the surface of ‪Mars‬. At … Continue reading

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MAVEN finds Mars behaving like a rock star

If planets had personalities, Mars would be a rock star according to recent preliminary results from NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. Mars sports a “Mohawk” of escaping atmospheric particles at its poles, “wears” a layer of metal particles high in its atmosphere, … Continue reading

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Blue, red, and green aurorae should be naked-eye visible in Martian sky

For the first time, an international team of scientists from NASA, the Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics of Grenoble (IPAG), the European Space Agency and Aalto University in Finland, have predicted that colorful, glowing aurorae can be seen by the … Continue reading

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Early results from MAVEN [video]

The MAVEN mission is designed to explore Mars’ upper atmosphere and its interactions with the Sun and solar wind. The goal of MAVEN is to understand the processes controlling the structure and composition of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere of … Continue reading

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MAVEN: Second deep-dip campaign completed

The second “deep-dip” campaign of MAVEN’s primary science mission was successfully carried out this week. After the five-day campaign, which brought the MAVEN spacecraft down to a periapsis of 131.5km, MAVEN is now back in its nominal science mapping corridor. … Continue reading

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MAVEN completes first 1,000 orbits

MAVEN completed 1,000 orbits around the Red Planet on April 6, four-and-a-half months into its one-year primary mission. MAVEN is in its science-mapping orbit and has been taking data since the start of its primary mission on Nov. 16, 2014. … Continue reading

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