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The overarching theme of the last decade or so of exploration of Mars is, what happened to the water?

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There's evidence of water flowing on Mars at one point in time, perhaps even oceans on Mars.

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The current atmosphere as it is today is much thinner and cannot support that kind of water on the surface, so

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MAVEN is going after, what is the current state of the upper atmosphere, how did it change,

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why did it change, and how did that impact the surface?

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George Diller: "Five, four, three, two, one. Main engines start, ignition,

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and liftoff of the Atlas V with MAVEN, looking for clues about the evolution of Mars through its atmosphere."

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MAVEN is a mission that is a first of its kind for the Goddard Space Flight Center, that is, a mission going to Mars

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that is managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center on behalf of the Principal Investigator at the University of Colorado.

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With it we provide the project management, which encompasses a whole range of disciplines:

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safety of mission assurance, the mission systems engineering, mission design, disciplined engineers,

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and the financial side of this, the tracking, the schedule, the budget. So that's all part of it.

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We're also delivering two of the instruments for the MAVEN mission, one being the magnetometers,

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there's actually redundant magnetometers, there's two on this mission,

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and there's a mass spectrometer, again, steeped in heritage of past developments from this particular group at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

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In fact they have a similar mass spectrometer on board the Curiosity rover at Mars right now.

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So this is two elements of Goddard, both from a project management standpoint

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and instrument delivery that are such an integral part of the MAVEN mission.

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Ultimately, I'm excited about the science that we hope to deliver for the world community and the Mars scientists.

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It's going to unlock a piece of the puzzle that we have not been able to do with current rovers or other orbiters to this point in time.

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This is another important piece that the scientists have been very interested

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for many years in what's happening all the way up through the upper atmosphere.

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[ satellite beeping ]