WASHINGTON: A NASA spacecraft that aims to study the upper atmosphere of Mars and uncover how its atmosphere changed about whether is poised to begin orbiting the Red Planet today.
After a 10-month travel, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) test is making its last approach to Mars and will begin surrounding Earth’s neighbor after 9:30 pm today (0130 GMT Monday).
Expert, an unmanned spacecraft, has voyage 711 million kilometers since it dispatched toward the end of last year.
NASA television scope of the orbital insertion begins at 9:30 pm (0130 GMT). The process will start with the concise terminating of six small thruster engines to steady the spacecraft, NASA said.
When MAVEN begins revolving around Mars, it will enter a six-week phase for tests.
At that point, it begins an one-year mission of studying the gasses in Mars’ upper atmosphere and how it interacts with the sun and solar wind.
Then again, it will execute five profound dips to a distance of just 78 miles over the Martian landscape to get readings of the atmosphere at various levels.
“The MAVEN science mission
focuses on answering questions about what happened to the water and carbon dioxide present in the Mars system several billion years back,” said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN central investigator from Colorado University-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
“These are critical questions for understanding the history of Mars, its atmosphere and its capability to support at any rate microbial life.”
NASA has sent several rovers and probes to Mars as of late. The latest automated vehicle, Curiosity, is investigating Gale Crater and Mount Sharp, searching for interesting rocks and returning information on whether the Martian environment shows confirmation of a past capacity to support life.
Scientists are attempting (NASA’s Mars spacecraft to begin orbit of Red Planet)
to understand if life ever advanced on the Red Planet, and what happened to transform Mars into a dry, infertile planet. A human mission to Mars could happen by the 2030s, as indicated by NASA.
An excursion there would take astronauts more remote than they have ever wandered some time recently, and it remains vague if those first pioneers would have the capacity to come back to Earth.
