NASA's robotic spacecraft fired off its braking rockets on Sunday, officially ending its 10-month journey to put itself into orbit around Mars to search for the Red Planet's lost water.
The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft fired its six rocket thrusters, trimming its speed from 12,800 mph to 10,000 mph after traveling 442 million miles, according to Reuters.
The process took 33-minutes before MAVEN was left in the clutches of Mars' gravity as it flew over the Red Planet's north pole and slipped into a looping 236-mile by 27,713-mile high orbit.
"I don't have any fingernails anymore, but we made it," Colleen Hartman, NASA deputy director for science at Goddard Space Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said during a NASA Television broadcast of MAVEN's arrival, according to Reuters.
Radio signals from MAVEN confirmed it was in Mars orbit at 10:25 p.m. EDT/0225 GMT. MAVEN will lower its altitude until it reaches its 93-mile by 3,900-mile operational orbit over the next couple of weeks.
The spacecraft will study how the solar wind strips away atoms and molecules in the planet's upper atmosphere, a process that scientists believe has been occurring "for eons."
"By learning the processes that are going on today we hope to extrapolate back and learn about the history of Mars," MAVEN scientist John Clarke, with Boston University, said in an interview on NASA Television, according to Reuters.
Scientists believe that Mars was not always the dry and cold place that it is today. The planet's surface is riddled with what seems to be dry riverbeds and minerals that form in the presence of water.
For water to pool on the planet's surface however, its atmosphere would have had to be a lot denser and thicker than it is today.
The Red Planet's atmosphere is now 100 times thinner than Earth's, according to NASA. Mars likely lost 99 percent of its atmosphere over millions of years as the planet cooled and its magnetic field decayed, which allowed charged particles in the solar wind to strip away water and other atmospheric gases.
The $671-million MAVEN mission is scheduled to last at least one year. The spacecraft joins two other NASA orbiters, two NASA rovers and a European orbiter currently working at Mars.
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