TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - NASA’s space ship MAVEN recorded its 1000th orbit of Mars on Monday, April 6. MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) arrived on September 2014 to study the Martian atmosphere.
"The spacecraft and instruments continue to work well, and we're building up a picture of the structure and composition of the upper atmosphere, of the processes that control its behavior and of how loss of gas to space occurs," MAVEN principal investigator Bruce Jakosky, from the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, said as quoted by Space.
Mars is now known as a cold and dry place with an atmosphere just 1 percent as dense as that of Earth at sea level. But scientists believe that things in the Red Planet were different billion years ago when it had rivers, ocean, and its air must have been much thicker.
MAVEN is expected to help researchers understand how, and how quickly, Mars lost most of its atmosphere. This information, in turn, could bring the Red Planet's dramatic climate shift into much clearer focus.
ERWIN Z | SPACE
