The Mars orbit insertion maneuver is due to begin at 9:50 p.m. EDT Sunday (0150 GMT Monday), and MAVEN will fire its six main engines for 33 minutes to slow down enough for Martian gravity to capture the spacecraft into a looping, highly elliptical orbit. Ground controllers inside an operations room at Lockheed Martin Corp. in Denver, the manufacturer of the MAVEN spacecraft, will oversee the critical maneuver. But they will receive data from the orbiter on a 12-minute time delay. The interplanetary distance between Earth and Mars means engineers on the ground will not have the ability to track the burn or send commands to MAVEN in real-time. Sundays arrival of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission concludes a 10-month journey since the probe blasted off Nov. 18, 2013, from Cape Canaveral, Fla., aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. The main objective of the $671 million mission is to find out how Mars evolved from a habitable world into the barren, desert planet scientists see today. The MAVEN mission is about understanding the history of the climate on Mars, said Bruce Jakosky, the missions chief scientist from the University of Colorado at Boulders Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Were going to be exploring an aspect of the Martian atmosphere and upper atmosphere that really has not been explored in detail by any spacecraft to date. MAVEN will initially enter a 35-hour-long orbit around Mars. Six more engine burns are on tap over the next several weeks to adjust the probes trajectory to reach an operational science orbit with a high point of 3,900 miles and a low point of 90 miles above Mars. The missions ground team will also commission the orbiters __ science instruments to prepare the sensors for their observations of the Martian atmosphere and the solar wind. Within six weeks, officials plan have MAVEN in its science orbit and ready for a one-year primary mission. Later in the mission, MAVEN will lower its orbit for a series of five deep dips into the upper fringes of the atmosphere down to an altitude of 77 miels to sample Martian air from closer to the surface. MAVEN will join NASAs two other operational Mars orbiters at the red planet -- the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey -- along with the European Space Agencys Mars Express spacecraft. With NASAs Curiosity and Opportunity rovers crawling around the Martian surface, the arrival of MAVEN will put the number of operational Mars missions at six. The number wont stay there for long. Indias first interplanetary spacecraft, the Mars Orbiter Mission, is scheduled fly into orbit around the red planet Wednesday.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 22:55:57 +0000
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