September 7, 2012, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

September 7, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN Mission) and ITM-Solar Wind Coupling

Dr. J. M. Grebowsky, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/695

MAVEN (to be launched November 2013) is a mission to determine the role that loss of volatiles from the Mars atmosphere to space has played through time, allowing us to understand the histories of Mars’ atmosphere and climate, liquid water, and planetary habitability. A key science objective leading to MAVEN’s ultimate goal of understanding the escape processes and escape rate variation is to determine the current state of the upper atmosphere, ionosphere and interactions with the solar wind. The complement of instruments on the spacecraft are familiar to terrestrial ionosphere-thermosphere-magnetosphere investigators. The instruments include solar wind, magnetosphere, ionosphere, and neutral atmosphere detectors (contributed from Berkeley, LASP and GSFC) that have historical ties to instruments flown on terrestrial-focused missions. Some physics areas to be explored at Mars include neutral atmosphere-ionosphere coupling and dynamics, ionosphere production by EUV and particle precipitation, auroral processes (e.g., source, acceleration, precipitation, ionization, wave processes), current sheets, reconnection, polar wind, magnetospheric penetration of solar wind convective E-field, and space weather. This presentation will discuss the goals of the mission, its architecture and science aspects that could have relevance to heliophysics-focused researchers.