Artist's concept of NASA's Maven spacecraft approaching Mars. NASA\/GSFC<\/p>\n
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Mars, get ready for another visitor or two. <\/p>\n
This weekend, NASA's Maven spacecraft will reach the red planet following a 10-month journey spanning 442 million miles. If all goes well, the robotic explorer will hit the brakes and slip into Martian orbit Sunday night. <\/p>\n
\"I'm all on pins and needles. This is a critical event,\" NASA's director of planetary science, Jim Green, said Wednesday. <\/p>\n
Maven is not designed to land; rather, it will study Mars' upper atmosphere from orbit. <\/p>\n
Hot on Maven's heels is India's first interplanetary spacecraft, Mangalyaan, which is due to go into orbit around Mars two days after Maven. <\/p>\n
Scientists want to learn how Mars went from a warm, wet world that may have harbored microbial life during its first billion years, to the cold, barren place of today. Maven should help explain the atmospheric changes that led to this radical climate change. <\/p>\n
\"Where did the water go? Where did the CO2 go from that early environment?\" said chief investigator Bruce Jakosky of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder. <\/p>\n
These escaping gases likely went down into the Martian crust and up into the upper atmosphere and out into space. Jakosky and his team hope to ascertain whether the climatic about-face resulted from the sun's stripping away of the early atmospheric water and carbon dioxide. <\/p>\n
\"We measure these things today even though the processes we're interested in operated billions of years ago,\" he said. <\/p>\n
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NASA's Maven spacecraft reaches Mars this weekend<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Artist's concept of NASA's Maven spacecraft approaching Mars. NASA\/GSFC CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla Continue reading