My name is Nick Schneider. I'm the science lead for the Imaging Ultraviolet
Spectrograph on the Maven mission, and I'm a member of the Laboratory for
Atmospheric and Space Physics. My name is Ian Stewart I'm a senior research
scientist here at LASP. Right now I'm working with the IUVS team MAVEN
mission to Mars. So the philosophy of NASA's Mars Program has been "Follow the
water," but "Where did the atmosphere go?" still a lingering question, and so
MAVEN is designed to figure out whether or not that atmosphere could have
escaped away to space. The MAVEN payload, all of the instruments on it are
designed to examine the processes by which gases escape from Mars.
When we look at the ultraviolet light we can tell what the atmosphere is composed of.
We can also tell its temperature, measure variations in the composition and
temperature as we look at different parts of the atmosphere, at different
seasons on Mars, different times of day. The Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph is
the most powerful ultraviolet spectrograph to be sent to another
planet. It's got a very high spectral resolution that allows us to look very
closely at an emission from hydrogen, and we look so closely that we can tell the
difference between hydrogen and heavy hydrogen, called deuterium. And by
measuring the ratio of heavy hydrogen to light hydrogen we can get a good guess
of just how much water has escaped from the planet. Now this has been done before in
the lower atmosphere but it's never been done in the upper atmosphere where the
escape is actually occurring, so that's going to be a first for MAVEN.
I've worked on many planetary missions all the way back to Mariner six and
seven. At the beginning of my scientific careers that's what I worked on, on Mars,
and so here I'm almost at the end, and it's a real pleasure to go back to to
Mars and study it in more detail asking better questions.
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