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My name is Nick Schneider. I'm the
science lead for the Imaging Ultraviolet

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Spectrograph on the Maven mission, and
I'm a member of the Laboratory for

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Atmospheric and Space Physics. My name is
Ian Stewart I'm a senior research

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scientist here at LASP. Right now I'm
working with the IUVS team MAVEN

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mission to Mars. So the philosophy of
NASA's Mars Program has been "Follow the

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water," but "Where did the atmosphere go?" still a lingering question, and so

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MAVEN is designed to figure out whether
or not that atmosphere could have

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escaped away to space. The MAVEN payload,
all of the instruments on it are

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designed to examine the processes by
which gases escape from Mars.

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When we look at the ultraviolet light we
can tell what the atmosphere is composed of.

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We can also tell its temperature,
measure variations in the composition and

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temperature as we look at different
parts of the atmosphere, at different

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seasons on Mars, different times of day.
The Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph is

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the most powerful ultraviolet
spectrograph to be sent to another

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planet. It's got a very high spectral
resolution that allows us to look very

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closely at an emission from hydrogen, and we look so closely that we can tell the

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difference between hydrogen and heavy
hydrogen, called deuterium. And by

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measuring the ratio of heavy hydrogen to
light hydrogen we can get a good guess

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of just how much water has escaped from the planet. Now this has been done before in

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the lower atmosphere but it's never been
done in the upper atmosphere where the

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escape is actually occurring, so that's
going to be a first for MAVEN.

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I've worked on many planetary missions
all the way back to Mariner six and

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seven. At the beginning of my scientific
careers that's what I worked on, on Mars,

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and so here I'm almost at the end, and
it's a real pleasure to go back to to

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Mars and study it in more detail asking
better questions.

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Music

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Beep, Beep, Beep