page_title: MAVEN
section_title: Results
hierarchical_section_title: MAVEN / Results
caption_attribution_description: English: Ultraviolet views of Martian atmosphere escaping http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=pia18613 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-351 Three views of an escaping atmosphere, obtained by MAVEN's Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph, are shown here. By observing all of the products of water and carbon dioxide breakdown, MAVEN's remote sensing team can characterize the processes that drive atmospheric loss on Mars. These processes may have transformed the planet from an early Earthlike climate to the cold and dry climate of today. MAVEN is NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the MAVEN project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, and built some of the science instruments for the mission. MAVEN's principal investigator is based at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder. The university provided science instruments and leads science operations, as well as education and public outreach, for the mission. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built and operates the spacecraft. The University of California at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory provided instruments for the mission. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, provides navigation support and Deep Space Network support, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, provides navigation and Deep Space Network support, as well as the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations. For more information about MAVEN, visit http://www.nasa.gov/maven and http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/. For more information about NASA's Mars Exploration Program, see http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov.
context_page_description: Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution is a spacecraft developed by NASA that went into orbit around Mars to study the planet's atmosphere. Mission goals include determining how the atmosphere and water, presumed to have once been substantial, were lost over time.
  MAVEN was launched aboard an Atlas V launch vehicle at the beginning of the first launch window on November 18, 2013. Following the first engine burn of the Centaur second stage, the vehicle coasted in low Earth orbit for 27 minutes before a second Centaur burn of 5 minutes to insert it into a heliocentric Mars transit orbit.
  On September 22, 2014, MAVEN reached Mars and was inserted into an elliptic orbit 6,200 km by 150 km above the planet's surface. The principal investigator for the spacecraft is Bruce Jakosky of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder.
  On November 5, 2015, NASA announced that data from MAVEN shows that the deterioration of Mars' atmosphere increases significantly during solar storms.
context_section_description: Data from the MAVEN orbiter published in 2015 confirmed that the solar wind is responsible for stripping away the atmosphere of Mars over the years, as the shielding effect of the global magnetic field was lost as the planet's internal dynamo cooled.
  Mars loses water into its thin atmosphere by evaporation. There, solar radiation can split the water molecules into their components, hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen, as the lightest element, then tends to rise far up to the highest levels of the Martian atmosphere, where several processes can strip it away into space, to be forever lost to the planet. This loss was thought to proceed at a fairly constant rate, but MAVEN's observations of Mars's atmospheric hydrogen through a full Martian year (almost two Earth years) show that the escape rate is highest when Mars's orbit brings it closest to the Sun, and only one-tenth as great when it is at its farthest.
  In September 2017, NASA reported radiation levels on the surface of the planet Mars were temporarily doubled, and were associated with an aurora 25 times brighter than any observed earlier, due to a massive, and unexpected, solar storm in the middle of the month.
caption: Mars – escaping atmosphere – carbon, oxygen, hydrogen (MAVEN; UV; October 14, 2014).[51]
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