Ten Years at Mars with NASA’s MAVEN Mission

  • Released Monday, September 23, 2024
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During its first decade at Mars, MAVEN has helped to explain how the Red Planet evolved from warm and wet into the cold, dry world we see today.

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Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

On September 21, 2014, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft entered orbit around Mars, beginning its ongoing exploration of the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere. The mission has produced a wealth of data about how Mars’s atmosphere responds to the Sun and solar wind, and how these interactions can explain the loss of the Martian atmosphere to space. Now, as MAVEN continues its mission, we can look back on the remarkable discoveries of its first decade at Mars.

In 2017, MAVEN revealed a twist in Mars’ invisible magnetic tail – due to the interaction of the Sun’s magnetic field with remnants of the early Martian magnetic field. Scientists had predicted that the two fields would interact through a process called magnetic reconnection, causing the direction of the Martian magnetotail to twist by 45 degrees as a result. Data from MAVEN’s magnetometer instrument confirmed these model predictions.

In 2017, MAVEN revealed a twist in Mars’ invisible magnetic tail – due to the interaction of the Sun’s magnetic field with remnants of the early Martian magnetic field. Scientists had predicted that the two fields would interact through a process called magnetic reconnection, causing the direction of the Martian magnetotail to twist by 45 degrees as a result. Data from MAVEN’s magnetometer instrument confirmed these model predictions.

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This page was originally published on Monday, September 23, 2024.
This page was last updated on Thursday, October 17, 2024 at 12:16 PM EDT.

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