A Nasa spacecraft designed to investigate how Mars lost its water is expected to put itself into orbit around the Red Planet today after a 10-month journey.
After travelling 711mn km from Earth, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, probe faces a do-or-die burn of its six braking rockets today.
If successful, the thruster burns will trim enough speed for MAVEN to be captured by Mars’ gravity and fall into a looping orbit.
Over the next six weeks, as engineers check MAVEN’s nine science instruments, the spacecraft will manoeuvre itself into an operational orbit that comes as close as 150km and as far away as 6,200km from Mars’ surface.
Unlike previous Mars orbiters, landers and rovers, MAVEN will focus on the planet’s atmosphere, which scientists suspect was once far thicker than the puny envelope of mostly carbon dioxide gas that surrounds it today.
