NASA has triumphed over the government shutdown to progress toward a planned Nov. 18 launch to Mars, USA TODAY reported.
The $671 million Maven mission, short for "Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution," was briefly halted, but won a special exemption two days into the shutdown.
"We're just three weeks away," said David Mitchell, Maven project manager from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, during a news briefing Monday at NASA headquarters. "We're on the doorstep of going to Mars."
The Maven mission, which will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, will be the first to study Mars' upper atmosphere and history of climate change. The spacecraft will spend one Earth year orbiting Mars to study the atmosphere's composition and how it responds to solar activity.
It will lift off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that's slated to be fueled Tuesday for a practice countdown. The planned November launch will put Maven on course to enter orbit around Mars on Sept. 22 next year.
The mission may unearth new mysteries or explain some old ones. Previous missions have revealed that liquid water once flowed over the surface of Mars, which experts believe once had an atmosphere thick and warm enough to hold water and potentially support microbial life.
"But somehow, that atmosphere changed over time to the cold, dry environment that we see today, one that is too cold, with an atmosphere too thin to be able to support liquid water," said Bruce Jakosky, the mission's principal investigator from University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. "What we don't know is what the driver of that change has been."
After its science mission, Maven could serve for a decade as a communications relay for current and future rovers and landers working on the surface of Mars. This critical communications capability earned Maven its reprieve from the government shutdown.
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