Starship Asterisk*

NASA's MAVEN Mars orbiter, depicted in this artist concept, will explore the mystery of atmospheric-loss on Mars. [i](Credit: NASA/GFSC)[/i]

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NASA has given a green light for development of a 2013 Mars orbiter mission to investigate the mystery of how Mars lost much of its atmosphere: the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission.

Clues on the Martian surface, such as features resembling dry riverbeds and minerals that only form in the presence of liquid water, suggest that Mars once had a denser atmosphere, which supported the presence of liquid water on the surface. As part of a dramatic climate change, most of the Martian atmosphere was lost. Maven will make definitive scientific measurements of present-day atmospheric loss that will offer insight into the Red Planet's history.

Approval to proceed with development followed a review at NASA Headquarters of the detailed plans, instrument suite, budget, and risk factor analysis for the spacecraft.

MAVEN Mission Home Page

The Red Planet bleeds. Not blood, but its atmosphere, slowly trickling away to space. The culprit is our sun, which is using its own breath, the solar wind, and its radiation to rob Mars of its air. The crime may have condemned the planet's surface, once apparently promising for life, to a cold and sterile existence.

Features on Mars resembling dry riverbeds, and the discovery of minerals that form in the presence of water, indicate that Mars once had a thicker atmosphere and was warm enough for liquid water to flow on the surface. However, somehow that thick atmosphere got lost in space. It appears Mars has been cold and dry for billions of years, with an atmosphere so thin, any liquid water on the surface quickly boils away while the sun's ultraviolet radiation scours the ground.

Such harsh conditions are the end of the road for known forms of life. Although it's possible that martian life went underground, where liquid water may still exist and radiation can't reach.

The lead suspect for the theft is the sun, and its favorite M.O. may be the solar wind. All planets in our solar system are constantly blasted by the solar wind, a thin stream of electrically charged gas that continuously blows from the sun's surface into space. On Earth, our planet's global magnetic field shields our atmosphere by diverting most of the solar wind around it. The solar wind’s electrically charged particles, ions and electrons, have difficulty crossing magnetic fields.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maven wrote:
A maven (also mavin) is a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. The word comes from the Yiddish meyvn and Hebrew mevin (מבֿין), with the same meaning, which in turn derives from the Hebrew binah, meaning understanding. It was first recorded in English around 1952, and popularized in the 1960s by a series of commercials for Vita Herring created by Martin Solow, featuring "The Beloved Herring Maven." The “Beloved Herring Maven“ ran in radio ads from 1964-1968, and was then brought back in 1983 with Allan Swift, the original voice of the Maven. Many sites credit Vita with popularizing the word Maven. An example of print advertisement including the Maven: "Get Vita at your favorite supermarket, grocery or delicatessen. Tell them the beloved Maven sent you. It won’t save you any money, but you’ll get the best herring".

Since the 1980s it has become more common since William Safire adapted it to describe himself as "the language maven". The word is mainly confined to American English, but did not appear with the publication of the 1976 edition of Webster's Third New International Dictionary; it is, however, included in the Oxford English Dictionary second edition (1989).

In network theory and sociology, a maven is someone who has a disproportionate influence on other members of the network. The role of mavens in propagating knowledge and preferences has been established in various domains, from politics to social trends.

Malcolm Gladwell used it in his book The Tipping Point (Little Brown, 2000) to describe those who are intense gatherers of information and impressions, and so are often the first to pick up on new or nascent trends. Gladwell also suggests that mavens may act most effectively when in collaboration with connectors - i.e., those people who have wide network of casual acquaintances by whom they are trusted, often a network that crosses many social boundaries and groups. Connectors can thus easily and widely distribute the advice or insights of a maven. In the afterword of The Tipping Point, Gladwell described a "maven trap" as a method of obtaining information from mavens. In the book he gave the example of the toll-free telephone number on the back of a bar of Ivory soap, which one could call with questions or comments about the product. Gladwell's opinion is that only those who are passionate or knowledgeable about soap would bother to call and that this is a method by which the company could inexpensively glean valuable information about their market.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Why is Mars cold and dry? While some recent studies hint that early Mars may have never been wet or warm, many scientists think that long ago, Mars once had a denser atmosphere that supported liquid water on the surface. If so, Mars might have had environmental conditions to support microbial life. However, for some reason, most of the Martian atmosphere was lost to space long ago and the thin wispy atmosphere no longer allows water to be stable at the surface. Scientists aren’t sure how or why this happened, but one way a planet can lose its atmosphere is through a process called ‘sputtering.’ In this process, atoms are knocked away from the atmosphere due to impacts from energetic particles.

Since Mars doesn’t have a strong intrinsic magnetic field, the atmosphere could have been eroded by interactions with the solar wind, and this video shows how that occurs. Also, the conditions in the early solar-system conditions enhanced the sputtering loss, and so the loss of Martian atmosphere could be caused by a complex set of mechanisms working simultaneously.

An upcoming mission could tell us what happened to Mars’ atmosphere. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft or MAVEN is equipped with eight different sensors designed to sort out what happened to the planet’s atmosphere.

MAVEN will be the first spacecraft ever to make direct measurements of the Martian atmosphere, and is the first mission to Mars specifically designed to help scientists understand the past – also the ongoing — escape of CO2 and other gases into space. MAVEN will orbit Mars for at least one Earth-year, about a half of a Martian year. MAVEN will provide information on how and how fast atmospheric gases are being lost to space today, and infer from those detailed studies what happened in the past.

Studying how the Martian atmosphere was lost to space can reveal clues about the impact that change had on the Martian climate, geologic, and geochemical conditions over time, all of which are important in understanding whether Mars had an environment able to support life.

The MAVEN will carry eight science instruments that will take measurements of the upper Martian atmosphere during one Earth year, equivalent to about half of a Martian year.

MAVEN is scheduled to launch in 2013, with a launch window from Nov. 18 to Dec 7, 2013. Mars Orbit Insertion will be in mid-September 2014.

For many, humanity’s long-term future is wedded to the idea that a significant portion of our population may one day migrate to Mars .

But before drafting plans to actually terraform the Red Planet, planetary scientists here on earth need to figure out just how and why Mars went so wrong.

Until researchers can turn to potential Mars colonists and relate the vagaries of its climatic history with some certainty, the idea of actually claiming the planet as a large-scale primary residence will remain in doubt.

To that end, late this year NASA is launching the first mission devoted solely to characterizing Mars’ upper atmosphere and specifically the processes that helped turn the planet into the dust bowl we’re roving today.

“It’s only been recently that scientists have realized that Mars’ upper atmosphere may have played a significant role in its changing climate [largely] due to stripping by the solar wind,” said Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission Principal Investigator.

Thus, the $671 million mission will help planetary scientists finally unravel the storied history of the planet’s early atmosphere and why it lost so much of it. MAVEN’s nominal orbital mission of one earth-year should begin in November 2014, assuming its scheduled twenty-day Cape Canaveral launch window — which begins November 18th — goes as planned.

With fuel conservation, Jakosky says MAVEN could even last a decade. First scientific results are expected in January 2015. ...

mjimih wrote:Can Mars Be Terraformed? NASA's MAVEN Mission Could Provide Answers
Tech - 5/29/2013

For many, humanity’s long-term future is wedded to the idea that a significant portion of our population may one day migrate to Mars .

rstevenson wrote:

mjimih wrote:
Can Mars Be Terraformed? NASA's MAVEN Mission Could Provide Answers
Tech - 5/29/2013

For many, humanity’s long-term future is wedded to the idea that a significant portion of our population may one day migrate to Mars.

Now there's a silly statement! One day a significant portion of humanity may live on Mars, yes. But no more than a few thousand are likely to actually migrate there. It's too costly and will remain so for the forseeable future. The Martians will have to grow there, having been created in the usual way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golgafrincham#Golgafrincham wrote:
<<Golgafrincham is a red semi-desert planet that is home of the Great Circling Poets of Arium and a species of particularly inspiring lichen. Its people decided it was time to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population, and so the descendants of the Circling Poets concocted a story that their planet would shortly be destroyed in a great catastrophe. (It was apparently under threat from a "mutant star goat"). The useless third of the population (consisting of hairdressers, tired TV producers*, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitisers and the like) were packed into the B-Ark, one of three purported giant Ark spaceships, and told that everyone else would follow shortly in the other two. The other two thirds of the population, of course, did not follow and "led full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone".

The B-Ark was programmed to crash-land on a suitably remote planet on one of the outer spiral arms of the galaxy, which happened to be Earth, and the Golgafrinchan rejects gradually mingled with and usurped the native cavemen, becoming the ancestors of humanity and thereby altering and distorting the course of the great experiment to find the question for the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, or so Ford Prefect presumes. A lot of them didn't make it through the winter three years prior to Arthur Dent's reunion with Ford Prefect, and the few who remained in the spring said they needed a holiday and set out on a raft. History says they must have survived.>>

mjimih wrote:... I have never read or heard or seen anything relating to "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy".

Spurred on by the previous post, I think I had better look at the aforementioned Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy book (or movie). So I'm off to the store to get it, to start brushing up on my galaxy reports!

In an increasingly rare display of sanity from Washington, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) was declared "excepted" from the current government shutdown so preparations for its November launch could continue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maven wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<A maven is a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. The word maven comes from Hebrew, via Yiddish, and means one who understands, based on an accumulation of knowledge. The word reached English through Yiddish meyvn, from Late Hebrew mēbhīn, which in turn derived it from the Hebrew mevin (מבֿין), meaning "one who understands," and relates to the word binah, which denotes understanding or wisdom in general. It was first recorded (spelled mayvin) in English in 1950 (in the Jewish Standard of Toronto), and popularized in the United States in the 1960s by a series of commercials created by Martin Solow for Vita Herring: "Get Vita at your favorite supermarket, grocery or delicatessen. Tell them the beloved Maven sent you. It won’t save you any money: but you’ll get the best herring".>>

[url=http://mars.nasa.gov/maven/multimedia/images/?ImageID=6589][b][i]Artist Concept of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN)[/i][/b][/url] [b][i]Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center[/i][/b]

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NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft successfully entered Mars' orbit at 7:24 p.m. PDT (10:24 p.m. EDT) Sunday, Sept. 21, where it now will prepare to study the Red Planet's upper atmosphere as never done before. MAVEN is the first spacecraft dedicated to exploring the tenuous upper atmosphere of Mars.

"As the first orbiter dedicated to studying Mars' upper atmosphere, MAVEN will greatly improve our understanding of the history of the Martian atmosphere, how the climate has changed over time, and how that has influenced the evolution of the surface and the potential habitability of the planet," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "It also will better inform a future mission to send humans to the Red Planet in the 2030s."

After a 10-month journey, confirmation of successful orbit insertion was received from MAVEN data observed at the Lockheed Martin operations center in Littleton, Colorado, as well as from tracking data monitored at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory navigation facility in Pasadena, California. The telemetry and tracking data were received by NASA's Deep Space Network antenna station in Canberra, Australia. ...

Welcome to Mars, MAVEN and MOM!
by Ben Montet
This week is an exciting time to be a Martian. On Sunday evening, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) satellite successfully entered orbit around Mars. Not to be outdone, this evening (tomorrow morning in Europe and Asia) the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) will do the same. You may be wondering why we need two[sic] send two more missions to Mars, when it's already inhabited entirely by robots. Today let's look at each of these missions and their scientific goals to see what we'll learn about Mars from each of these orbiters. ...

[b][i]Credit: Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Colorado; NASA[/i][/b]

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NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft has obtained its first observations of the extended upper atmosphere surrounding Mars.

The Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) instrument obtained these false-color images eight hours after the successful completion of Mars orbit insertion by the spacecraft at 10:24 p.m. EDT Sunday, Sept. 21, after a 10-month journey.

The image shows the planet from an altitude of 36,500 km in three ultraviolet wavelength bands. Blue shows the ultraviolet light from the sun scattered from atomic hydrogen gas in an extended cloud that goes to thousands of kilometers above the planet's surface. Green shows a different wavelength of ultraviolet light that is primarily sunlight reflected off of atomic oxygen, showing the smaller oxygen cloud. Red shows ultraviolet sunlight reflected from the planet's surface; the bright spot in the lower right is light reflected either from polar ice or clouds.

The oxygen gas is held close to the planet by Mars' gravity, while lighter hydrogen gas is present to higher altitudes and extends past the edges of the image. These gases derive from the breakdown of water and carbon dioxide in Mars' atmosphere. Over the course of its one-Earth-year primary science mission, MAVEN observations like these will be used to determine the loss rate of hydrogen and oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. These observations will allow us to determine the amount of water that has escaped from the planet over time.

MAVEN is the first spacecraft dedicated to exploring the tenuous upper atmosphere of Mars.

Planetary Society guest blog: PREPARING FOR A-MAVEN SCIENCE!

Karl Battams writes...
I could get deeper into science jargon but the bottom line here is that MAVEN is designed specifically for studying the stuff that the comet – by pure coincidence – is going to be affecting and altering. The spacecraft will be able to tell us exactly how, when and ultimately why, these influences occur, and will be a fantastic reference point for understanding the Martian atmosphere, and how planetary atmospheres in general react to meteor and dust input. (This is really a spectacularly good coincidence – I just can’t emphasize that enough!)

Three views of an escaping atmosphere, obtained by MAVEN’s Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph. By observing all of the products of water and carbon dioxide breakdown, MAVEN's remote sensing team can characterize the processes that drive atmospheric loss on Mars. - [b][i]Image Credit: University of Colorado/NASA[/i][/b]

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NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft has provided scientists their first look at a storm of energetic solar particles at Mars, produced unprecedented ultraviolet images of the tenuous oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon coronas surrounding the Red Planet, and yielded a comprehensive map of highly-variable ozone in the atmosphere underlying the coronas.

The spacecraft, which entered Mars' orbit Sept. 21, now is lowering its orbit and testing its instruments. MAVEN was launched to Mars in November 2013, to help solve the mystery of how the Red Planet lost most of its atmosphere.

"All the instruments are showing data quality that is better than anticipated at this early stage of the mission," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN Principal Investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "All instruments have now been turned on -- although not yet fully checked out -- and are functioning nominally. It's turning out to be an easy and straightforward spacecraft to fly, at least so far. It really looks as if we're headed for an exciting science mission." ...