![]() Well, have you ever imagined what Earth would look like during the solar eclipse if you were on the moon?Īccording to report by Xinhua, a microsatellite developed by the Harbin Institute of Technology in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, which is now orbiting the moon, captured mesmerizing photos of Earth during the solar eclipse in the early hours of Wednesday (Beijing time). Recently, South America witnessed a total solar eclipse and the images of it were just EPIC. Isn’t it? But astronauts would beg and even plead to differ. ![]() While they pitched a mission with clear science goals, they hope MAVEN will raise more questions than it answers, opening the door for more detailed orbiter missions.From the ground, Earth looks like a boundless fertile plain that beckons to be explored and exploited. The MAVEN team is calling the mission a once-in-a-career opportunity, but they hope they’re wrong about the once part. ![]() They’re also working on coordinating with the European Space Agency whose Mars Express satellite is in orbit around the red planet right now. The MAVEN team hopes the ESA spacecraft will be able to gather supporting data, because when you’re doing something like backwards modeling a planet’s atmospheric history it’s good to have multiple vantage points. Right now, the MAVEN team is gearing up for the launch window that opens on November 18. Any time the MAVEN spacecraft spends as a communications relay takes away from time spent gather the data it was designed for. This is a useful capability, particularly with another rover on its way to Mars in 2020, but one the MAVEN team doesn’t want to exploit until the mission has accomplished its science goals. The MAVEN spacecraft has a secondary capability: it can serve as a relay satellite for robotic missions on the Martian surface. In that full year of the primary mission, they should get a solid look at Mars's atmospheric makeup. MAVEN has enough fuel to last a decade, which means it’s likely the mission will be extended after that first year. The science team is hopeful that within three months of the orbiter's arrival at Mars they will have retrieved enough good data to make at least a preliminary model of ancient Mars and its climate. Some of the MAVEN science team at LASP, by the author So why we haven’t seen an atmospheric mission launched to Mars in the past? The formal term for an atmospheric mission is aeronomy, which includes the study of ionization and the behavior of isotopes in the upper atmosphere. According to Michael Meyer, lead scientist of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, there's nothing sexier sounding than an aeronomy mission. MAVEN’s mission is complicated but will offer an important look at the planet's history. After attending and hearing the project discussed in-depth, I think this mission is going to be pretty awesome. And this past weekend, LASP invited a small cohort of new media practitioners to Boulder to learn about MAVEN right from the science team. MAVEN is a NASA mission, but the science team backing the spacecraft comes from a host of sites-NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Centre, JPL, University of California at Berkeley, Lockheed Martin, and the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). ![]() An artist's concept of MAVEN in orbit around Mars.
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