Mars has always been a planet that sparked our interest as humans to explore. Long before space exploration it started out as assumptions of civilizations or fictional Martian invaders such as in War of the Worlds, but now-a-days we know better (hopefully). Over the past 40 years we have sent quite a few probes, and more recently, rovers to the Red Planet. In the past 10 years some of the most notable projects sent up have been Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity.

Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars

Currently one of the main aspects that scientists are studying is the atmosphere of Mars, or the lack of one. A recent study of Martian meteorites done at Oxford compared with rocks sampled on the Martian surface by Spirit, suggests that Mars at one point had an oxygen rich atmosphere. This atmosphere would have existed around 4000 Myrs ago, which means that Mars would have had an oxygen rich atmosphere far before that of Earth’s that is estimated to have formed only 2500 Myrs ago. Today the atmosphere on Mars is almost only carbon-dioxide. So what happened to it? There area few hypothesis that include: erosion by solar wind, a collision with a body large enough to blow away most of the atmosphere, or loss due to low gravity and particles reaching their escape velocity. To hopefully answer the question once and for all NASA along with the University of Colorado and UC Berkeley created MAVEN or Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN probe.

A Depiction of MAVEN

MAVEN’s mission will be orbit Mars and use instruments such as the Solar Wind Electron Analyzer (SWEA) and Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS), along with many more, to measure the impact of solar wind on the planet’s atmosphere as well as it’s composition. Eventually comparing these measurements to ones made one the surface by Curiosity NASA hopes to reveal what happened to the oxygen and water that once was abundant on Mars.

There is one small issue though. Parties in our government stupidly decided to use the new budget as a bargaining chip, which has now caused a shutdown that includes NASA. The launch window for MAVEN is from  from 1:47 p.m. to 3:47 p.m. EST on November 18, 2013. Essentially if the shutdown lasts for more than a few days the building of MAVEN will be delayed enough to miss the launch window. This would be quite unfortunate considering the total put into the project if almost $650 million and the launch would have to be rescheduled for 2016. By then the solar cycle will have greatly reduced the results of the mission, as pointed out by a NASA employee. Hopefully those politicians get it together so we can continue exploring and furthering our understanding of science and the solar system.

Sources

http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5532/mars-atmosphere-was-oxygen-rich-4-billion-years-ago

http://gizmodo.com/government-shutdown-could-delay-a-650-million-nasa-mis-1433554228

http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/files/2012/11/MAVEN-HQ_FactSheet.pdf