MAVEN Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph

  • Released Thursday, June 13, 2013
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The philosophy of NASA's Mars Program has been "Follow the water," but "Where did the atmosphere go?" is still a lingering question. Although fluvial features such as dry riverbeds are visible on Mars, the atmosphere today is too thin to support liquid water, implying that Mars once had a thicker atmosphere that was lost to space. NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN Mission, or MAVEN, will test this hypothesis. As part of its remote sensing instrument package, MAVEN's Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) will look at isotopic hydrogen ratios in the upper atmosphere of Mars, helping scientists to determine just how much water once flowed across the Red Planet.

MAVEN will use its Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) to study the upper atmosphere of Mars in unprecedented detail, helping scientists to determine what happened to the planet's ancient atmosphere - and its liquid water.

Watch this video on the NASAexplorer YouTube channel.

For complete transcript, click here.

For More Information

See http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/maven/news/iuvs.html

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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

This page was originally published on Thursday, June 13, 2013.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:52 PM EDT.

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