CU-Boulder’s first planetary mission will explore Mar’s Upper Atmosphere
Nov. xx, 2013
Bruce Jakosky
History will be made next week when the first NASA planetary mission ever led by
the University of Colorado Boulder blasts off to Mars! It’s called MAVEN.
Principal investigator and mission leader, Bruce Jakosky, of the Laboratory for
Atmospheric and Space Physics at CU-Boulder, explains.
CUT 1 “MAVEN stands for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission.
MAVEN’s goal is to build off of some of the recent measurements that spacecraft’s
have made that tell us that there’s been a lot of water on Mars, a very different
climate early in its history. (:15) We’re trying to answer the question of what
happened to the climate? Where did the water go? Where did the carbon dioxide go
from an early atmosphere?” (:24)
Jakosky says Mars once had a warm, thick atmosphere that could have supported
microbial life. But something happened to the red planet’s atmosphere, says Jakosky,
turning it into the cold, barren world it is today.
CUT 2 “With Mars having had more water, more carbon dioxide early in its history,
there are two places that it can go: It can go down into the crust, the water can
percolate down and be lost. It can freeze out in the crust. The carbon dioxide can
form carbon-bearing minerals in the crust. (:18) It can also go up and be lost to
space. The top of the atmosphere can be stripped away by the solar wind, or by
sunlight.” (:25)
Equipped with instruments built by CU-Boulder, NASA and the University of
California Berkeley, Jakosky says MAVEN will gather data from Mars’ upper
atmosphere.
CUT 3 “So what we’re going to do is examine the structure and composition, the
energy inputs into the upper atmosphere, the solar wind, the solar ultraviolet-light,
and solar energetic particles that come out of major storms on the sun, and see how
the atmosphere responds. (:18) The solar wind is a stream of high-velocity particles
coming out of the sun. We feel it here on the Earth. It hits the Earth’s environment. It
also hits Mars’ environment. And it has the ability to strip gases away from the
upper atmosphere.” (:33)
Jakosky says this is the first mission to explore Mars upper atmosphere. He says it
should add one more piece of information to help answer the question that has been
puzzling humans for hundreds of years.
CUT 4 “The overriding question for Mars is about the possibility of life on Mars.
We’re not a life-detection mission but we’re part of understanding the environment
that might be able to support life. (:10) As we’re looking now for life in the universe,
we’re interested in what that tells us about us. We are life forms. We’re interacting
with our planetary environment. We want to understand- are there any other life
forms anywhere? It would be truly amazing if we on Earth were the only life in the
universe.” (:29)
MAVEN will launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida sometime during a 20-day
period that begins Nov. 18. The trip to Mars takes 10 months. MAVEN will go into
orbit around Mars in Sept. 2014.
-CU-