NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft is still a year away from its official launch date but project engineers are rushing it for its pre-launch tests beginning Nov. 18.
Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) is a $671 million mission to send an orbiting spacecraft to the Red Planet and study its atmosphere. Scientists believe that studying the planet’s atmosphere will help them understand its history—how the water evaporated and changed the climate causing the death of the planet.
MAVEN was sent to the Kennedy Space Centre Florida on Aug. 2 to prepare it for the pre-launch tests to be conducted in the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Nov. 18. The launch window is from 1:47 p.m. to 3:47 p.m. EST. If successful, MAVEN will proceed to its official launch on September 22, 2014.
"We've been working on this mission for years, and we're close now, real close, and we're going to Mars, so it's really pretty cool to be at this point," said Dave Mitchell, project manager from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. on a press release.
The project engineers are very careful in its preparation because once they miss the deadline due to technical problems and unable to complete the pre-launch tests by December, MAVEN’s official launch date will be delayed for two years.
"It's going to tell us why the atmosphere changed over time," said Bruce Janofsky, the mission's lead scientist from the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder. "We think that the surface was conducive to supporting life 4 billion years ago, and not today, and we're trying to learn why."
MAVEN is different from other spacecrafts sent to Mars as it will focus more on the atmosphere. It is equipped with eight instruments that will study the planet’s thin atmosphere and the sun’s interaction with it. The spacecraft will have five years to complete the mission in the planet with five “deep dips” through the upper atmosphere to check traces of water and carbon dioxide.