2014-09-23 12:00 [photo: sxc / cc / flaivoloka] 
The orbit around Mars has reached a new American spacecraft MAVEN. This occurred on Monday. The probe is to explore the upper atmosphere of Mars – NASA announced.
Travel probe since the launch of the Earth lasted 10 months, during which defeated 771 million kilometers. The operation was controlled autonomously by onboard computers, instructions for the maneuver has already been submitted by the mission control team. After entering the Martian orbit – September 22 at 4.24 Polish time – then probe confirmed its position as NASA ground stations in the United States and Australia.
It will start a six-week phase of testing instruments, probes and corrective maneuvers, after which will be on the target orbit science. Then for a year will take appropriate scientific data collection phase, during which the MAVEN will examine the chemical composition and structure of the upper atmosphere of Mars and track the loss of gas into space and interaction with the solar wind.
During the mission the probe will be five change the height of its orbit, so that the point closest to the planet’s surface distance was reduced from 150 km to 125 km. The aim is to find the boundary between the lower and the upper layer of the Martian atmosphere.
The whole project took more than a decade. As noted by Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator of the project, from the initial idea for this space mission passed 11 years.
MAVEN probe was launched on November 18, 2013. From Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It has three sets of scientific instruments: Particles and Fields Package for measuring the solar wind and the ionosphere of the planet, Remote Sensing Package to study the properties of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere and the spectrometer to measure the chemical composition and isotopic. (PAP)
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