MAVEN Spacecrat, Photo:Lockheed Lockheed Martin has completed the assembly of NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) sp...
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| MAVEN Spacecrat, Photo:Lockheed |
Lockheed Martin has completed the assembly of NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft.
The orbiter is now undergoing environmental testing at the company’s Space Systems facilities, near Denver, Colorado.
MAVEN is the next mission to Mars and will be the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere.
During the environmental testing phase, the orbiter will undergo a variety of rigorous tests that simulate the extreme temperatures, vacuum and vibration the spacecraft will experience during the course of its mission.
Currently, the spacecraft is in the company’s Reverberant Acoustic Laboratory being prepared to undergo acoustics testing that simulates the maximum sound and vibration levels the spacecraft will experience during launch.
Following the acoustics test, MAVEN will be subjected to a barrage of additional tests, including: separation/deployment shock, sine vibration, electromagnetic interference/electromagnetic compatibility (EMI/EMC), and magnetics testing. The phase concludes with a thermal vacuum test where the spacecraft and its instruments are exposed to the vacuum and extreme hot and cold temperatures it will face in space.
MAVEN is scheduled to ship from Lockheed Martin’s facility to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in early August where it will undergo final preparations for launch.
Scheduled to launch in November 2013, MAVEN is a robotic exploration mission to understand the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time.
It will investigate how much of the Martian atmosphere has been lost over time by measuring the current rate of escape to space and gathering enough information about the relevant processes to allow extrapolate backward in time.
MAVEN’s principal investigator is based at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. The university will provide science operations, science instruments and lead Education/Public Outreach. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center manages the project and provides two of the science instruments for the mission.
Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colo., built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. The University of California at Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory provides science instruments for the mission.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provides navigation support, the Deep Space Network and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
