MAVEN Particles & Fields Package

  • Released Wednesday, March 5, 2014
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To planetary scientists, the Martian atmosphere presents an intriguing mystery: today it's a thin, cold wisp of carbon dioxide with just one percent the pressure of Earth's atmosphere, but long ago it was thick and warm enough to support lakes and rivers on the Martian surface. How did Mars lose so much of its early atmosphere? Scientists think that the solar wind may be responsible, and NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft is designed to find out. The instruments of MAVEN's Particles & Fields package will study the interaction of the solar wind with Mars's upper atmosphere, helping scientists to better understand how Mars became the freeze-dried planet that we see today.

Studying the Solar Wind at Mars
Robert Lin, the late director of the Space Sciences Laboratory, discusses how NASA's MAVEN spacecraft will study the interaction of the Martian atmosphere with the solar wind. MAVEN's findings will reveal how Mars lost its early atmosphere, turning it from a warm, wet planet into the cold, dry one that we see today.

Watch this video on the NASAexplorer YouTube channel.

For complete transcript, click here.

For More Information

See http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/

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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

This page was originally published on Wednesday, March 5, 2014.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:51 PM EDT.

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