On Nov. 18, 2013, NASA launched the MAVEN spacecraft to Mars.
On Nov. 18, 2013, NASA launched the MAVEN spacecraft to Mars.
The name MAVEN stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN. The spacecraft is an orbiter designed to help scientists figure out what happened to Mars' water and its atmosphere. Mars is dry today, but it data from several Mars missions suggest that it was a much wetter environment a long time ago.
MAVEN is tracking the rate of atmospheric loss from Mars. The planet has a super thin atmosphere that has been leaking into space for a few billion years. Scientists think that when Mars lost its atmosphere, water dried up on the surface as a result. Solar storms that blast radiation into the solar system appear to have blasted away some of the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere once kept Mars warm enough to sustain water, and losing that greenhouse gas turned Mars into a cold and dry place.
Artist's conception of the MAVEN spacecraft orbiting Mars. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)
Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.
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