Tag Archives: IUVS

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →