BOULDER,
Colo. - A new NASA probe slated to launch in 2013 will take the most detailed
look yet at the atmosphere of Mars.
A team led by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, will design, build and operate the Mars
Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN), an orbiter designed to study the
upper atmosphere of the red planet and its interactions with the sun.
The win was billed as the largest
research contract ever awarded to LASP, during a Sept. 15 press briefing it held here to
detail the selection decision.
A consortium of groups led by LASP
will build the $485 million MAVEN spacecraft and carry out mission operation duties. The team
includes the University of California,
Berkeley; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.; NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; and Lockheed Martin Space Systems in
Littleton, Colo.
Ready to go
Set to launch Nov. 18, 2013, MAVEN should take about 10 months to reach Mars and enter orbit around the red
planet on Sept. 16, 2014.
"We've got
a team that's ready to go," said Bruce Jakosky, LASP associate director and principal investigator
for the mission. "MAVEN is to study the upper atmosphere of Mars, how gas is
lost to space and how the planet interacts with the sun and with the solar wind."
MAVEN will
carry eight science instruments on board
that are divided into three packages, Jakosky said, collectively making
measurements needed to constrain that loss-to-space process.
"This
mission is really about understanding the history of the Martian environment,"
Jakosky said. "Our goal is to understand how gases are lost to space today and
how the processes responsible for that loss have operated over the last 4 billion years," he said.
Heritage of hardware
Cindy Schulz, systems engineer for
the spacecraft from Lockheed Martin Space Systems, told SPACE.com that
MAVEN's development, in order to keep costs low, will draw upon a heritage of Mars
expertise at the company.
Schulz said
MAVEN's structure and propulsion system are designed to be similar to the Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter, now orbiting the red planet.
MAVEN will
be the second mission of NASA's Mars Scout program, a recent initiative by the
agency for smaller, lower-cost spacecraft. The first Mars Scout mission is the Phoenix Mars
Lander, which launched in 2007 and now is operating on the red planet's
surface. It too was built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems and is managed by Edward Sedivy, who now will serve as the spacecraft
manager for MAVEN.
The LASP's multiphase MAVEN proposal was five years in development. Jakosky said
that all of MAVEN's science instruments have heritage, and were picked for
their ability to detail Mars' upper atmosphere and the interactions with solar
wind.
"There have
been a few scattered measurements, especially from [the European Space
Agency's] Mars Express, and some of the Russian spacecraft that hinted at some
of the processes. We know many of the processes are going on today, but we
haven't had the simultaneous measurements that let us really understand how the
processes operate ... and allow us to extrapolate back in time," Jakosky said.
High priority science
The selection of MAVEN
will impact LASP in many ways - scientific,
cultural, monetary and programmatic, said LASP Director
Daniel Baker. "We have very much wanted to
establish clearly through hardware leadership that we are at the forefront of
Mars science. This win does that," he said.
Baker said
the selection shows that a university team can compete and win in the current
NASA culture. The larger slice of the funding coming to both LASP and Colorado is key, he added, with the programmatic
partnership tie to Lockheed Martin and NASA Goddard expected to serve LASP well
in the future.
Jakosky noted
that the consortium of five institutions means that the MAVEN mission would
bring some $60 million directly to LASP, with roughly $120 million provided to
Lockheed Martin.
MAVEN was selected over another Mars Scout competitor: The
Great Escape mission proposed by Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio. The Great Escape mission also was proposed to study Mars' upper atmosphere,
including its dynamics and evolution, which has been check-listed as a high
priority by the scientific community.
Delay and re-evaluation
In the first round of the Mars Scout
2006 competition, the MAVEN and Great Escape missions were down-selected for
2011 out of 26 proposals for further evaluation in a concept study phase.
However, in December 2007, NASA
announced that the launch of the next mission in the Mars Scout program - originally
planned for 2011 - was being delayed until 2013 due to an "organizational
conflict of interest" that was discovered in one of the mission proposal
team's Phase A Concept Study, NASA reported at the time.
"Because of
the delay, we had the opportunity to re-evaluate how long we needed to make
observations in order to obtain our science results," Jakosky said. "We wanted
to propose a mission length that was tied strongly to the ability to achieve
our science goals. In the end, we felt that one year was appropriate, and that
was what we proposed."
Jakosky also noted that another factor is the declining solar cycle during
MAVEN's mission, which would mean relatively few major solar
events after one year of observations. "Thus, one year also meshed well with
what we are most likely to be seeing," he said.
"MAVEN will
be making measurements for one Earth year - which is long enough to give us
accurate measurements of the entire region of near Mars space that is important
to us," Jakosky said. Additionally, once in orbit around Mars, MAVEN is being equipped
to operate as a telecommunications relay for future landers, he added.
The
University of Colorado, Boulder, is the single largest university
recipient of NASA research dollars in the nation, according to the space
agency. In fiscal year 2008, it received roughly $56 million from NASA.
Bruce
Benson, president of the University of
Colorado, Boulder, underscored the fact that the MAVEN win is the largest
single research contract in the university's history, with space studies being
a critical piece of Colorado's space economy - which is second only to
California. "We're quickly becoming a university of the universe," he concluded.
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