such a quiet mission, finally an update was released today: NASA’s MAVEN Spacecraft Completes First Deep Dip Campaign

and another item i didnt notice previously: NASA’s MAVEN Mission Identifies Links in Chain Leading to Atmospheric Loss


Edit: doh!! wrong thread..

ADMIN: Moved to start a new topic of Orbital Science from the start of the deep dip campaign.

MAVEN has observed aurora and the mysterious dust cloud, and apparently the LPW has seen it since the beginning of operations.

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/march/nasa-...mars/index.html

MAVEN is on the case.

Well... if dust is observably being sputtered off of Mars, as these observations suggest, that sort of explains where the red dust covering parts of Phobos and Deimos came from. I had always thought that dust plumes from impacts, even over billions of years, didn't seem like they would provide enough material to cause the pigmentation on the moons we see today. If these solar-wind-generated sputtered air-and-dust plumes have been happening for millennia, and if some fraction of the plumes are accelerated by the solar wind interactions out to the distance of the moons, we then have a process for the material transfer that makes more sense, and explains what we see on the moons.

Also, this shows rather strongly how solar wind interactions with the upper atmosphere could well have sputtered off a relatively thick Martian atmosphere over billions of years, doesn't it? Consider that a lot more gas molecules would get accelerated to escape velocity by such interactions than dust particles, and that we can see how many dust particles have been boosted (enough to account for the red coloration of the moons), and you get a good gut-level appreciation of the long-term effectiveness of the solar wind's sputtering capabilities.

-the other Doug

Is this the same cloud detected from Earth based observations, announced last month?

I don't think so. those were transient water and CO2 clouds, this is a (permanent? ) dust cloud

MAVEN data through May 15, 2015 are now available to the public. I'm not sure what's there; I'm curious what there is to play with from IUVS, which produced pictures like these.

Press conference Thursday being reported by the Space media.

http://www.space.com/31000-mars-atmosphere...ts-preview.html

New results at http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/2015/1...ian-atmosphere/.

I wonder if it is possible that the high-altitude dust is a temporary phenomenon resulting from the comet Siding Spring? The Science paper seems silent on this.

This morning, I was reading about how ice cores have been used to track the varying abundance of components of Earth's atmosphere, and was wondering about the viability of a mission to do this on Mars. There's plenty of ice in the high latitudes, and it must be chronologically sorted, although the absolute scale might be hard to work out, and highly nonlinear. But it seems like a potentially interesting mission. Tracking the isotopes in H2O and CO2 would be a couple of the more interesting investigations.

There was a question related to this at the press briefing, and the answer was that comets make only a minor contribution to the high-altitude dust; that interplanetary dust particles are the major contributor.

MAVEN Gives Unprecedented Ultraviolet View of Mars

Click to view attachment

http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/2016/1...t-view-of-mars/

Short movie

Here is an image of Phobos from Maven. The source is this press release from many months ago - I just noticed it had not been noted here.

http://mars.nasa.gov/news/whatsnew/index.c...amp;NewsID=1893

I just added some different processing of my own. I have inverted it from the published format because I think it is the northern hemisphere which is illuminated (Phobos having seasons just like those of Mars). The background is UV photons scattered by the gas molecules escaping from Mars.

Phil

Click to view attachment

EDIT: I have found that this image should be flipped left-right. The northern hemisphere is illuminated, and this view is from quite far south with the upper limb near the equator at about 90 degrees east.

Great catch!

I never get tired of images of Phobos or Deimos with Mars in the background in some way.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6764

Yikes, this would've been a tad more embarrassing than Mars Climate Orbiter! Close flyby to come on the 6th...

I must confess that this press release sounds a little bit hyped-up to me. Flybys at Phobos of Mars Express are known and science investigations are planned months in advance.

Perhaps a bit. It certainly seems like it's getting a fair amount of attention from the world press. However, I can also see why they might want that, and it's an interesting story in its own right for people who do not ordinarily pay much attention to robotic spaceflight.

Are any science observations being done by Maven?

The article doesn't state if it will?

It was observed in ultraviolet in December 2015, 500 kilometres away: http://mars.nasa.gov/news/2016/maven-obser...far-ultraviolet

Not sure if they'll do any new measurements this time; how far will this flyby be in distance?

Not sure. Phobos' orbital velocity is a bit more than 2.1 km/sec, and the press release says that the avoidance maneuver allows MAVEN to miss the intersect point by 2.5 min so...minimum 315 km? That doesn't account for MAVEN's own velocity at this point in its elliptical orbit, though.

MAVEN Selfie Marks Four Years in Orbit at Mars

I seem to remember there was a topic about spacecraft selfies, but I can't find it anymore

Poor old MAVEN doesn't get much love here, because it doesn't produce images. Except when it does. Here's a great new one from the IUVS instrument.

https://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/2021/1...card-from-mars/

And see more here:

https://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/scienc...ing-highlights/

Phil

After hunting down the Ingenuity presentation on Day 1 of the recent MPEAG meeting, I started listening to a lively MAVEN presentation by PI Shannon Curry. The video is on this page,  https://mepag.jpl.nasa.gov/meetings.cfm, and her presentation starts at about 3:15. Really interesting.

Apparently we almost lost the mission due to an IMU failure.
https://www.space.com/nasa-mars-spacecraft-maven-nearly-lost

They surely took their time to tell the general public about the spacecraft's technical problems.

I have no inside knowledge about this, but I suspect that the media reports have been somewhat modulated for dramatic effect.

IMU problems and subsequent use of all-stellar mode is pretty old news. See "Verification of Mars Odyssey All-Stellar Attitude Determination Ten Years After Launch", Gingerich et al, 2015, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7119001 (paywalled, but available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/30...rs_after_launch )

The wrinkle for MAVEN was that they had some failures that required some ground-commanded manipulation of onboard redundancy. On previous missions, the transition to all-stellar could be done in a more leisurely and measured fashion.

MAVEN is not like a lander with regular releases of imagery, so it's much easier to conceal issues; I think that because the spacecraft was quickly saved, but then had to spend a lot of time finding new ways to operate and maintain attitude before science could begin, media attention would not have been very useful. Though we are only speculating on why it was hush-hush for so long.

FWIW this was mentioned in the MEPAG report from about a month ago. https://www.lpi.usra.edu/mepag/meetings/mep...anson_Meyer.pdf slide 6.