MARVEL -
Mars Volcanic Emission and Life
An international team led by Mark Allen, an atmospheric
chemist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California,
developed the Mars Volcanic Emission and Life (Marvel) Scout mission.
Marvel is a Mars orbiter that
totes several instruments. This proposed Scout craft would scan Mars' atmosphere
for chemical traces of life, or even environments supportive of life, anywhere
on the planet.
While circling Mars, an
objective of Marvel is to seek out telltale releases from any Mars microbes that
inhabit the red planet.
The spacecraft would be outfitted with
an infrared solar occultation spectrometer, a device that would look sideways
through Mars' atmosphere toward the setting or rising Sun. This would allow the
instrument to make extremely sensitive readings of what chemicals are in the
thin air that the sunlight passes through before hitting the spectrometer.
Another Marvel instrument is a
submillimeter spectrometer, built to look through any dust in the martian
atmosphere to seek localized atmospheric concentrations of the chemicals of
interest. Among several duties, this device would also be used to seek localized
concentrations of water vapor in the atmosphere, a strategy to identify places
where subsurface water sources are actively venting.
A third instrument is a Canadian Space
Agency-supplied camera for showing the context of cloud conditions during
atmospheric measurements.
"By the end of this decade,
Marvel could either detect and localize any existing life and active volcanism
on Mars or put extremely stringent limits on their existence," Allen said in a
JPL statement.
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If selected as NASA's first Mars
Scout mission, Marvel would launch in the third quarter of 2007. It would arrive
at Mars about a year later, use aerobraking to achieve the best shape for its
polar orbit pattern, then begin its primary science mission in October 2008 to
examine Mars for a full 22-month Martian year.
Next page: Phoenix Mars Scout
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 Scout proposal. Orbiter would look for hints of microbial life on the red planet, as well as active volcanism. CREDIT NASA./JPL)
