David Mitchell is the project manager of the MAVEN mission, which will examine environmental changes on Mars. MAVEN instruments will look beyond the planet's surface and provide a better understanding of solar interactions, magnetic fields, and the atmosphere in general.

NASA Tech Briefs: What is the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft?

David Mitchell: MAVEN is a Mars orbiting spacecraft, which will study the Mars upper atmosphere, the interactions with the Sun, and will obtain a better understanding of climate change at Mars over time. It will go into an elliptical orbit with an orbital period of 4.5 hours. The closest that MAVEN will get to the Mars surface in this orbit is approximately 125 kilometers.

The MAVEN Project is being managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center on behalf of the Principal Investigator, Bruce Jakosky, from the University of Colorado in Boulder (CU-LASP). In addition to the University of Colorado and Goddard, the MAVEN partner organizations include the University of California/Berkeley, Lockheed Martin/Denver, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There are a total of eight science instruments on MAVEN delivered by UC/Berkeley, CU-LASP, and Goddard. These eight instruments are grouped into three instrument packages: the Particles & Fields Package; Remote Sensing Package (also known as the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrometer); and the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS). We have to look at the three instrument package data sets as an integrated collection of data. We’re looking at a complex system with the Mars atmosphere. We will be looking at the atmosphere in situ as we pass through the thickest part of the atmosphere, and study the important solar interactions. There is also an Electra telecomm relay package (provided by JPL) that is installed on the spacecraft. The Electra package enables high-quality communications between surface assets at Mars (such as MSL) and Earth.

NTB: How is the MAVEN mission different from previous Mars missions?

Mitchell: MAVEN is the first mission to study the upper atmosphere in-depth. It continues the successful “follow the water on Mars” theme. Previous Mars missions were focused largely on the history of the planet’s surface. MAVEN goes after the other half of the story: the atmosphere.

Rovers are sampling the soil or visually observing the terrain or the temperatures. Orbiters have high-resolution cameras on-board like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which focus on what’s going on with the surface. There have been orbiters with some sensors onboard that give the MAVEN science team some tantalizing hints on what might be happening with the atmosphere.

MAVEN is the first mission that was put together specifically to answer the questions about what’s happening in the upper atmosphere. A lot of the scientists on this team have been a part of Mars missions for a long time, and there are a lot of unanswered questions about what’s been happening up there in the upper atmosphere. In the early 2000s, there was a decadal survey that came out, [which showed] that these were areas of strong interest that the MAVEN mission is in fact answering.

NTB: You said there’s a lot of interest. Why is the study of the Mars atmosphere an important one?

Mitchell: From a pure science standpoint, it is very compelling to understand what happened to the ancient Mars atmosphere and why did it change. Where did the water go? Scientists believe there was liquid water flowing (river channels) on the surface of Mars and a much thicker atmosphere, perhaps a “greenhouse atmosphere.” Some have even suggested that there could have been a global ocean on early Mars.

There is also a hypothesis that at one time there was a much stronger magnetic field surrounding Mars. The belief is that the protective shield diminished over time and exposed the Mars atmosphere to solar winds, ripping away the atmosphere and creating a more barren Mars environment today. We hope that MAVEN’s instruments will provide a much better insight into what is occurring today in the atmosphere, understand changes that occur over a one-year period of time, and project back in time as to what drove the current state.

What they’re going to do is analyze the composition of the atmosphere right now. Scientists say that this is a strong area of interest at this particular time in the 11-year cycle. Typically, in the past, it has been a time of high volatility with the solar storms. Interactions between the sun and the Mars atmosphere [will be analyzed] in that one-year period of time, as well as what has been happening with the escape of compounds from the surface. We’re looking at the current state, the rate of escape that’s happening with the various compounds and particles, and then over a period of a year, we’ll be able to extrapolate backwards in time on what could have happened, and perhaps why things changed so dramatically over several billion years.

NTB: What are the remote sensing instruments currently being integrated into MAVEN?

Mitchell: The Remote Sensing Package is actually a single instrument package which is comprised of two components, the Remote Sensing Data Processing Unit and the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrometer. The Remote Sensing Data Processing Unit provides power and data interfacing between the instrument and the spacecraft. The UltraViolet Spectrograph is the “observing” portion of the package that contains apertures, detectors, and mirrors which measure the ultraviolet spectra. In this spectrum, we can observe and better understand the composition of the atmosphere.

NTB: What will the instruments be analyzing?

Mitchell: The Remote Sensing Package will be analyzing the composition of the upper atmosphere in the ultraviolet wavelength. The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) will analyze, in situ, various gas species and ions as MAVEN passes through the lower portion of the orbit, as low as 125 km from the Mars surface. The Particles & Fields Package will analyze much of the solar interactions with particles and fields observed at Mars and the atmosphere in general, including the electrons, ions, wave electric fields, and magnetic fields.

NTB: When will we see this launched to Mars?

Mitchell: Opening day of the launch period is November 18, 2013. We are currently tracking to that plan.

NTB: From a technology perspective, when you’re designing these packages, what would you say are your biggest challenges?

Mitchell: The good news is that a lot of technology is similar to technologies used on other missions. The team leveraged a lot of the instrument designs from previous missions’ instruments. For example, much of the Particles and Fields Package has flown on other types of missions, such as the STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) mission; that’s a mission that’s sun-orbiting versus the MAVEN Mars-orbiting mission. They’ve been able to utilize a lot of existing technology from other missions that have succeeded. The same applies with the Remote Sensing Package and with NGIMS. With the spacecraft, we’ve leveraged a lot from the heritage of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But even with the use of existing technology, every new build brings with it a new set of challenges brought on by various factors such as electronic parts obsolescence, different environmental conditions in space, and different people building the flight hardware. That’s where a rigorous test program, quality assurance, verification program, etc. are so critical, ultimately, to mission success.

NTB: What are the next big milestones for this project?

Mitchell: Right now, we’re in the thick of it with delivering all of the instruments. Of the 8 we have slated to be installed, 6 of them have been delivered and integrated here at Lockheed Martin. A bunch of the Particles & Fields Packages came in a week ago [December 2012], and they’re bolting them on now and doing harness connections. The Remote Sensing Package was delivered last month, and then trailing will be one of the Particles & Field packages as well as the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS).

In January, the next big milestone is to start system-level environmental testing. We’ll go into acoustics, EMI, EMC, migration, and thermal vacuum testing. We hope to wrap up at the end of the spring, and then the current plan is to ship to the Cape [Canaveral] in the beginning of August. Then we’re just on the road to integration with the launch vehicle and then on to launch. All the hardware is really coming together. So far, things are talking to each other the way they should be talking to each other. There haven’t been a lot of surprises. There haven’t been a lot of hardware changes or software rewrites. We used engineering development units for spacecraft subsystems. We plugged them into this simulated spacecraft, ran through a lot of the scripts, and made sure everything [worked together]. Now that the real flight hardware is coming in, we’re seeing very little surprises. So far, so good. We’ll get into environmental testing, and then there are typically some surprises. So it’s about: How do we respond to that and work through the issues? So far, I’ve seen a great team working together, and I expect we’ll continue to operate that way.

NTB: What is your favorite part of the job?

Mitchell: There’s something about Mars missions I now see that really gets the excitement going with everybody. It’s all hands on deck. They’re very skilled and a real pleasure to work with.

For years, you’re seeing these designs on paper, and they get reviewed and reviewed. Now we’re seeing it all come together. The hardware’s being built, and the hardware’s working as designed. That’s very exciting. Getting the launch campaign is another part of the excitement. What will really be great is when we get to Mars and we start getting the data to the science community. They’ve been waiting for this for many, many years. The principal investigator has worked 9 almost 10 years on the job, so it’ll be well over a decade before he starts getting the data that he’s dreamed about here.

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