Goddard Goes to Mars

Members of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission (MAVEN) share their experiences of working on the project.For complete transcript, click here.Watch this video on the NASAexplorer YouTube channel. On September 21, 2014, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission, or MAVEN, went into orbit around the Red Planet. Its goal: to understand how a changing atmosphere transformed Mars from a warm, wet environment in its youth to the desert world that we see today. Building such a mission and sending it to Mars is a hugely complex task, requiring the close coordination of hundreds of individuals around the country. In this video, several of the team members who made the mission possible share their experiences of working on MAVEN. For More InformationSee [http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/maven/main/index.html](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/maven/main/index.html) Related pages

MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) is NASA's next mission to Mars, designed to figure out how the Red Planet lost its early atmosphere to space. Principal Investigator Bruce Jakosky discusses Mars's missing atmosphere and the challenges of building the MAVEN spacecraft.For complete transcript, click here. Ancient riverbeds, crater lakes and flood channels all attest to Mars's warm, watery past. So how did the Red Planet evolve from a once hospitable world into the cold, dry desert that we see today? One possibility is that Mars lost its early atmosphere, allowing its water to escape into space, and NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft will investigate just that. On September 25, 2013, MAVEN Principal Investigator Bruce Jakosky delivered a presentation at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, discussing NASA's next mission to Mars. An edited version appears below. Related pages