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So a real outstanding question is, what was the early atmosphere of Mars like,

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and for how long did it last, and did the conditions on Mars early on that might have been favorable for life

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persist for hundreds of millions of years, for tens of millions of years, for how long exactly did they persist?

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So the MAVEN mission is designed to really get at the climate history of Mars.

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My name is Paul Mahaffy. I'm Chief of the Planetary Environments Lab

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in the Solar System Exploration Division of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

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MAVEN is a Mars orbiter, not designed to take pictures of Mars,

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but really with chemical sensors to understand how the present atmosphere is escaping from Mars,

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and then through modeling try and extrapolate that back in time,

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and try to understand whether the ancient atmosphere of Mars was similar or different than it was today.

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MAVEN stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission.

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The NGIMS experiment on MAVEN is the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, we have an acronym for everything here at NASA,

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and this experiment is a quadrupole mass spectrometer with two ion sources

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designed to look at both neutral gases and ions in the upper atmosphere of Mars.

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In fact as we dip down into the atmosphere, we will measure the altitude variation of those chemical constituents,

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we'll look for the composition, we'll look for how that composition changes with solar events

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like big solar flares and solar activity, and we'll do that for a whole Earth year on many, many orbits around Mars.

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The closest place we can look in our solar system, the place that we can get to easiest,

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that has an atmosphere, that has evidence for past water on the surface, is Mars.

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If the ancient atmosphere of Mars was much heavier, the potential of Mars to support life might have been much more favorable.

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And so the MAVEN mission is designed to really let us understand current escape processes on Mars,

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and then extrapolate back to very ancient Mars to try to understand the conditions that were present back then.

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