NASA mission asks why Mars has no atmosphere

BERKELEY — NASA this week gave the green light to a mission to Mars that will seek to understand why and how the red planet lost its atmosphere 3-4 billion years ago. Dubbed the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission, it is led by principal investigator Bruce Jakosky of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder) and managed by David Mitchell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. More than half the instruments aboard the spacecraft, with a planned launch in late 2013, will be built at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) under the direction of MAVEN deputy-principal investigator Robert Lin. "There's lots of evidence that in the past, Mars had running water, but to have running water you need a thick atmosphere, and that's gone now," said Lin, a UC Berkeley professor of physics and former director of the SSL. During its planned one-year mission, MAVEN will collect evidence to support or refute the reigning theory that once Mars lost its magnetic field, the solar wind and solar storms scoured the atmosphere away. "Once you lose your atmosphere, that's the end of any evolved life," Lin added. "This mission will also tell us what might happen to other planetary atmospheres, even Earth's, in the long run." “A better understanding of the upper atmosphere and the loss of volatile compounds like carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and water to space is required to plug a major hole in our understanding of Mars,” said Jakosky, who is a professor in CU-Boulder's geological sciences department.