University of Colorado Boulder: MAVEN Mission Marks a Decade in Mars Orbit Under LASP Leadership

Excitement was in the air on September 21, 2014, as scientists and engineers gathered in the lobby of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics’ Space Technology Building to eat cake and watch as NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmospheric and Volatile EvolutioN) mission performed its orbit insertion around Mars. At 6:50pm MT, MAVEN successfully entered orbit, beginning its incredible journey at the Red Planet.

Ten years later, MAVEN has completed more than 22,000 orbits of Mars, revealing amazing discoveries on its mission to study the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere and determine how its climate evolved from warm and wet to the cold, dry planet that we see today. The mission has produced a wealth of data about how Mars’ atmosphere responds to the Sun and solar wind, and how these interactions can explain the loss of the Martian atmosphere to space.

Over the last decade, the mission has also shaped the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), where MAVEN became the first LASP-led planetary mission and continues to be one of the largest NASA contracts that CU Boulder has received.

LASP employs nearly 200 CU Boulder students, and many have been part of the MAVEN mission. Gwen Hanley, a research scientist at the Space Science Laboratory at Berkeley and deputy lead of MAVEN’s STATC instrument, began her MAVEN journey as an undergraduate student researcher at CU Boulder.

Currently, more than 50 LASPians are a part of the MAVEN team, including the mission’s principal investigator, Shannon Curry. The previous PI, Bruce Jakosky, is also at LASP. The laboratory is also responsible for managing science operations and public outreach and communications for the mission.

Today, MAVEN continues to make exciting new discoveries about the Red Planet that increase our understanding of how atmospheric evolution affected the previous presence of liquid water on its surface, potentially determining its prior habitability.

“It is an incredibly exciting time for the MAVEN team as we celebrate 10 years of Martian science and see the tremendous impact this mission has had on the field,” said Curry, who is also a LASP researcher and an associate professor in CU Boulder’s Astrophysical & Planetary Sciences Department. “We also look forward to the future discoveries MAVEN will bring.”