University of Colorado officials announced today that the university’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics has been chosen by National Aeronautics and Space Administration to lead a $485 million mission to study the past climate of Mars.
A team of scientists and engineers led by the Boulder campus laboratory will design, build and operate instrumentation for a spacecraft set to orbit Mars after its planned launch in 2013.
It is the largest research contract ever awarded to CU-Boulder.
“We have an outstanding mission that will obtain fundamental science results for Mars,” said Bruce Jakosky, principal investigator for the mission.
The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, or MAVEN, is the second launch to Mars in the scout program designed to send lower-cost spacecraft to study the Red Planet. The Mars Phoenix lander was the first.
The MAVEN spacecraft will be outfitted with a sensing package that will determine the characteristics of Mars’ upper atmosphere. The University of California at Berkeley will be responsible for a package designed to measure and document the planet’s ionosphere, and a third package designed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center will measure neutral and charged forms of gases in the atmosphere.
The MAVEN project will be staffed by a still undetermined number of both graduate and undergraduate students at the LASP facility.
