CU-Boulder's MAVEN enters Martian orbit after 10-month journey
There was a nervous buzz in the air at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton Sunday night.
Lockheed's Waterton Canyon facility is the mission operations center for NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission.
And, as planned, the University of Colorado-led MAVEN had gone quiet.
So they watched ... and waited. And at 8:27 p.m., they celebrated.
MAVEN successfully entered orbit around Mars on Sunday night.
Conceived at CU's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the 10-years-in-the-making mission, after 10 months of travel since its launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., came down to a few nail-biting moments.
There was no Earth-to-space ground control; MAVEN was programmed to fire six thruster engines and properly establish orbit on its own. However, it takes 12 minutes for data to be received on Earth from Mars.
So, when orbit was confirmed, the control room understandably erupted in cheers.
“It looks like we’re in orbit at Mars!” LASP's Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator, said in a CU news release. “... Of course, now the real work begins, of getting ready to carry out our science mission. Then, we’ll begin to reap the rewards of our efforts."
Tim Priser, MAVEN's chief systems engineer at Lockheed, said Sunday night he was confident all would go as planned, due to his team testing every possible scenario.
"There are so many things — functions, features — that need to work not only just right but in the just the right order. It's staggering," he said.
"But if there's an issue, it will come down to a failure of imagination."
MAVEN was programmed to enter Martian orbit about 236 miles above its northern pole. It will fly about 90 miles above the planet's surface at its nearest point, and as far out at 3,900 miles, where it will study Mars' upper atmosphere. The total price tag on the mission stands at $637 million.