MAVEN enters Mars orbit, MOM close behind

[dragon]

Surprised no one mentioned it yet. Hopefully the India probe makes it. The India probe going to test fire their main engines around 1430 as a precursor to orbital insertion.

CNN) -- MAVEN has arrived in Mars's orbit after traveling 442 million miles in the course of 10 months to get there.

It won't land on the red planet but instead study Mars' atmosphere from above to answer questions about its climate change, NASA says.

NASA's MAVEN craft will live up to its formal name -- the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution craft -- by helping scientists figure out how ancient Mars changed so dramatically into the planet we know today.

It is the first mission devoted to studying the upper Martian atmosphere as a key to understanding the history of Mars' climate, water and habitability.

Mars rover reaches key destination; 'new science ahead!'

"The evidence shows that the Mars atmosphere today is a cold, dry environment, one where liquid water really can't exist in a stable state," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator, during a mission preview briefing last week at NASA headquarters in Washington. "But it also tells us when we look at older surfaces, that the ancient surfaces had liquid water flowing over it."
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So where did the planet's water and carbon dioxide go?

Jakosky said MAVEN will help unravel that mystery by using its scientific instruments to measure the composition and escape of gases in the Martian atmosphere.

MAVEN is to study the top of the atmosphere to determine the extent to which losing gas to space might have been the driving mechanism behind climate change, Jakosky said.

MAVEN has company out near Mars, man-made and otherwise.

India's first mission to the Red Planet, the Mars Orbiter Mission, is set to arrive a few days after MAVEN does. The director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, Jim Green, says the United States and India are interested in cooperating as their crafts gather data about the planet.

There's a visitor of the cosmic kind, too.

Comet Sliding Spring, which was discovered last year, will be closest to Mars about four weeks after MAVEN arrives.

The comet is going to miss Mars by about 81,000 miles, said Jakosky.

"I'm told that the odds of having an approach that close to Mars are about one-in-a-million years," he said, adding that dust from the comet carries only a "relatively minimal" risk to the spacecraft.

MAVEN will take advantage of the rare flyby by observing the comet itself, as well as its effect on the Martian atmosphere.

Interactive: Exploring Mars from Viking to MAVEN

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[Guardsman Bass]

Excellent thread title.

I'm hoping the India probe makes it too. The more countries doing planetary space exploration, the better - and India did this probe quite cheaply as well.

[Zeropoint]

Indeed. When it comes to space exploration, I see us all as being on Team Humanity. Best of luck to both MOM and MAVEN. Go go Team Jewish Mother!

[Simon_Jester]

MAVEN sounds interesting; my dad knows one of the guys heavily involved in it. The idea of actually measuring levels of outgassing and so on on the Martian surface is one of those "wait, why hasn't that already been tried?" things.

[Sea Skimmer]

Finding life/water was rather more important in broke strokes, and even ignoring the 'what do taxpayers care about' factor, I'd suspect that establishing how much water on Mars is pretty important to making any real sense of data on outgassing and present state of the atmosphere. NASA has taken a ground up approach...

Fact is it took until the 1990s for electronics to really reach the kind of reliability we'd like to have for this sort of long endurance mission, earlier missions were crapshoots even if all the engineering and production was done to the highest standards, and that deterred even trying when we still understood so little about how our own planet worked, particularly its climate. Then we started in small steps and have been ramping up ever since, though the future is as uncertain as ever now thanks to the James Watt telescope consuming all money in sight. Thank god for India and China finally reaching the point of trying this kind of thing to make up some difference.

People lament the slow pace of space exploration, but I think it's just reality that earlier efforts were far too much brute force for too little data to make much sense. Literally too little data, the data compression and transmission technology just couldn't support what instruments could churn out. Hell its still a major problem among many.

[Guardsman Bass]

What I'm hoping is that we can make the $1 billion-and-under missions much better with new technology, since NASA under Bolden has outright ruled out any further missions on a higher budget than that for the foreseeable future (which means no Europa Lander/Orbiter any time soon - a damn shame).

I especially hope that JWST doesn't have some unforeseen problems once we launch it. It should be totally worth it once it's done. In the mean-time, lower-cost exoplanet searches by telescope have gotten better over the years. It's supposedly impossible now to do direct imaging with occulters using ground-based telescopes to find earth-sized exoplanets (even with adaptive optics), but maybe they'll figure something out.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

A very quick update: The Indian Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM/Mangalyaan) successfully made Martian orbit less than half an hour ago..

[dragon]

A very quick update: The Indian Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM/Mangalyaan) successfully made Martian orbit less than half an hour ago..

YES

[sarevok2]

Is $75 million cost of the MOM spacecraft alone or includes the launcher ?

It seems like ISRO succeeded in making of most economical interplanetary probes ever.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Is $75 million cost of the MOM spacecraft alone or includes the launcher ?

It seems like ISRO succeeded in making of most economical interplanetary probes ever.

I'm not sure, because nothing I can find is telling me whether or not the price tag of the mission includes the launch vehicle, but if it doesn't ... it doesn't really matter, because the cost of the PLSV launch vehicle is roughly $15 million USD, which would still makes the Mars Orbiter Mission stupidly cheap. Mind you, they got it so cheap by minimizing on-ground testing, ruthlessly exploiting the low cost of Indian labor (engineers there make less than $10,000 USD, and they were frequently working 18-20 hour days during the development of the mission,) and having a miniscule scientific payload (15 kilograms of instruments, which is less than a quarter of MAVEN's payload.)

Of course, there is a substantial price to pay for being so cheap. Because the bigger, more capable, launch vehicle they wanted to use still tends to blow up about 50% of the time; they had to settle for a smaller launch vehicle and expend almost all of the orbiter's on-board propellant just getting it to Mars. That's why MOM is in such a goofy orbit (roughly 420 km by 77,000 km.) And since it is primarily a technology demonstrator, its scientific payload is similarly cheap-and-cheerful (which is why its instruments only mass 15 kg.) This would be fine for most purposes, except for that orbit ... MOM's instruments are mainly designed to study the Martian atmosphere, so most of its payload can only be useful around periapsis.

So, as a cheap-and-cheerful scientific mission, MOM is pretty limited. As a cheap-and-cheerful technology demonstrator, so far MOM has been a stunning success.