New NASA Mission Hoping To Find Out What Turned Mars Into The Red Planet
GREENBELT, Md. (WJZ) -- This Sunday may mark the end of summer, but it's the start of a new Mars mission. A NASA spacecraft will lock into orbit on Sept. 21.
Alex DeMetrick reports it's hoping to find out what turned Mars into the Red Planet.
This is one guess of how Mars looked billions of years ago:
"We do think it might have been much warmer and certainly much more humid and have more in fact water standing on its surface," said Dr. Pamela Conrad, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
What Dr. Conrad would like to know is what turned a potentially blue world into a red one. A NASA spacecraft called Maven has spent months closing in on Mars to find out.
Equipped with chemical and radiation sensors, it's wide swinging orbit will send it skimming through Mars' upper atmosphere, sniffing out what's up there.
"It's going to be measuring the chemical species at the top of the Martian atmosphere," Conrad said.
Looking for traces of the air that may have existed long ago and what might have stripped it away, leaving a dry, frozen world.
One theory: heat at the center of Mars' core cooled, leaving its atmosphere vulnerable to radiation we're protected from by a magnetic field generated by a molten sphere of metal at the center of the Earth.
At least, that's one theory of how Mars' atmosphere escaped.
"What we don't know for certain is what the processes are by which it did escape. And we hope to learn something about that with Maven," said Conrad.
Two of the instruments looking for answers about what happened to Mars were designed and built in Maryland at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
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