Tag Archives: Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN

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 →