AlQa'dah 22, 1435, Sep 17, 2014, SPA -- The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced Wednesday that its Maven spacecraft will reach Mars this weekend after a 10-month journey of 711 kilometers. "This is a critical event," because if operations go as planned a robotic explorer will survey Mars' upper atmosphere from orbit on Sunday, said Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science. Maven is not designed to land but India's first interplanetary spacecraft, Mangalyaan, will join it two days after to go into orbit around Mars. Scientists want to use Maven to understand how Mars went from a warm, wet atmosphere to a cold, barren place. The planet's radical climate change could have happened when natural gases went under Mars' crust and out into the upper atmosphere into space and the sun, removing early atmospheric water and carbon dioxide "We measure these things today even though the processes we're interested in operated billions of years ago," said Bruce Jakosky, chief investigator of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
