Category: MAVEN Science

 MAVEN is NASA’s way of saying the “Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution” mission. It takes a lot less time to just say MAVEN. Considering that the word maven means an expert in a particular field that is looking to share that knowledge with others, the acronym works. NASA’s MAVEN mission is equipped to investigate the upper atmosphere Mars in more detail than ever and show researchers on Earth what happened to remove the heavier elements from the air around the planet long ago.

NASA has a long history of using acronyms to shorten complex mission names. Even NASA itself is an acronym for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The agency’s early manned flights in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo days did not go by acronyms, but most unmanned probes these days choose that route. Recent exceptions include Juno, the Jupiter-bound bound spacecraft that launched Aug. 5, 2011.

From installing the solar arrays and instruments to covering the high-gain antenna and packaging the spacecraft inside its payload fairing – not to mention all the intensive testing involved – see in about two minutes what took MAVEN engineers months of careful, precise work to accomplish before the spacecraft is sent into space.

 

There will be a prelaunch press conference for MAVEN at 1 p.m. EST today on NASA TV. Participants are Geoffrey Yoder, NASA deputy associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate; Omar Baez, NASA launch director; Vernon Thorp, United Launch Alliance’s program manager for NASA missions; David Mitchell, NASA’s MAVEN project manager; Guy Beutelschies, Lockheed Martin’s MAVEN project manager; and Clay Flinn, launch weather officer, 45th Weather Squadron at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

Former Star Trek actor LeVar Burton shares MAVEN’s story. Burton has been a lifelong advocate of education through his many STEM initiatives and participation in educational programming.  He is also known worldwide as Geordi LeForge, chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” as Kunta Kinte in the breakthrough mini-series “Roots” and beloved by generations of children as the host and producer of the “Reading Rainbow” television series.

Interviews with MAVEN’s scientific and launch teams detail the goals for the Mars-bound spacecraft and the years of work that went into building the spacecraft and then getting ready to launch it.

Hello from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida where the MAVEN spacecraft is undergoing careful preparations at the hands of engineers and technicians ahead of its launch to study the upper atmosphere and history of Mars. Adjacent to Kennedy, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, teams are readying a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket which will lift the MAVEN spacecraft off Earth and send it on a 10-month flight to the Red Planet. MAVEN will orbit Mars, not land on it, and collect data about the upper atmosphere of our closest planetary neighbor in unprecedented detail.

Launch is planned for Nov. 18 at 1:28 p.m. EST. We will provide a minute-by-minute account of the procedures on launch day from Hangar AE as the launch and mission teams get ready to begin this exciting mission!

We will cover the processing of MAVEN and its Atlas V launch vehicle and you can get more in-depth information about MAVEN here and about NASA’s Mars exploration program here.