​Mission Mars: NASA’s MAVEN Successfully Enters Into The Red Planet’s Orbit

After hurtling through space for a period of 10-months, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, which was launched on Nov 18, 2013, entered into Mars orbit declared the US space agency. Mission controllers had to wait for a 33-minute engine firing before acknowledging that MAVEN was into the orbit, NASA said.

This milestone marks the culmination of 11 years of concept and development for MAVEN, setting the stage for the mission's science phase, which will investigate Mars as no other mission has.

MAVEN has been launched in a bid to explore unknown details about the history and climate of the Red Planet. It is believed that these observations will help space scientists determine how much gas from Mars' atmosphere has been lost to space throughout the Red planet's history and which processes have driven that loss.

According to Bruce Jakosky, a principal investigator for MAVEN at the University of Colorado in Boulder, "We are the first mission devoted to observing the upper atmosphere of Mars and how it interacts with the Sun and the solar wind."

David Mitchell, MAVEN's project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, said, "Every day at Mars is gold. The early checks of instrument and spacecraft systems during cruise phase enable us to move into the science collection phase shortly after MAVEN arrives at Mars."

MAVEN will, now, begin a six-week commissioning phase, which includes manoeuvring the spacecraft into its final orbit and testing its instruments and science mapping commands. Thereafter, the NASA’s spacecraft will begin its one-Earth-year primary mission to take measurements of the composition, structure and escape of gases in Mars' upper atmosphere and its interaction with the Sun and the solar wind.
(Image: NASA)