Dipping into the Martian Atmosphere
September 10, 2014The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) mission will use this Lockheed Martin spacecraft in an attempt to find out where the water went that once ran on Mars. Unlike earlier missions to the red planet, which peered at the surface from orbit or probed it with landers, Maven will study the interactions between the planet’s pink sky and the solar radiation reaching it from above, at times taking a “deep dive” for in-situ data.
Credit: LASP/University of Colorado