NASA returns to Mars to find out why the planet was wiped - The Mundo.es

NASA has announced

returning to Mars this Monday, November 18, with the mission MAVEN ( Evolution Mission Mars Atmospheric and Volatile ), which aims to explore and understand the Martian atmosphere the reasons for the planet dried.

During the presentation of the project, NASA explained that this mission that has cost 487,000 million euros , depart Kennedy Space Center (Florida). The probe will take ten months to get to the red planet, according to the director of the Planetary Science Division, Jim Green, Blue was billions of years ago .

“Mars has a thicker surface than it did before in the pictures and was more blue than it looks today on this planet so dry and cold”, said Green during the press conference.

NASA scientists have insisted thoroughly investigate that planet so similar to Earth, which lost much of its atmosphere, and with it the water and the possibility of life as known. “No other planet has so much attention as Mars society,” he pointed associate administrator of the U.S. Agency, John Grunsfeld.

Likewise, he added that “Mars has been the inspiration for legends of science fiction and for other scientists while they thought they were actually doing science ended science fiction.”

unmanned spacecraft is scheduled to enter the Martian atmosphere on September 22, 2014, which will orbit Earth during a solar year, at an altitude of between 6,115 kilometers and 125 kilometers above the surface Martian. Scientists are convinced that Maven can gather critical information for how was Mars before the Sun “conspired” to undo its atmosphere “molecule by molecule.”

Another responsible for this mission, Bruce Jakosky, explained that the rover ‘Curiosity’, which leads into the Red Planet since 2012, has discovered different things about the atmosphere of Mars, which contradict theories. “Between 85% and 95% of the planet’s atmosphere changed for several billion years, for example,” he noted Jakosky. “How did that happen is a mystery and that’s why we are launching Maven. To look at these processes and understand how climate changed in the past,” he added.

According

has detailed, Maven is designed to determine how much atmosphere is lost, how long and what were the atmospheric processes that loss. “The atmosphere of Mars is now too cold, too thin to support liquid water”, said the scientist.

The panel added that several signs have indicated that in the past Mars had a magnetic field that repelled the solar wind deflecting sideways, but off the magnetic field, managed to penetrate the atmosphere to undo it.

As explained by experts, there is a window of time in which Maven should get going as the alignment of the planets and other factors favor the penetration into Martian orbit. “There is a period between November 15 and December 15 in which if we do not launch the probe will require much more fuel to enter orbit,” said Jakosky, who has suggested that the best time to launch is “in half of that period because that’s when the energy requirements are lower, the fuel used will be the lowest and have more resources available for an extended mission. “