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[ bell rings, dramatic music ]
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Jakosky: My name is Bruce Jakosky, I'm the Principal Investigator on the MAVEN mission,
which means that I'm responsible for the implementation of the entire mission and getting the science results out of it.
MAVEN is the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission.
Our goal is to study the role that loss to space has played in the history of the atmosphere.
At its peak we've had about 500 or 600 people working on the project.
That's difficult in itself because the team is distributed around the country.
Mitchell: Well an important part of the MAVEN mission is getting all the teams working together.
We have partnerships spread across the country, starting with the University of Colorado LASP, with Lockheed Martin in Denver,
University of California at Berkeley, with the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, of course Goddard Space Flight Center.
What excites me about MAVEN is just the collaboration, it's been a tremendous experience to be working for a common goal.
Sidney: MAVEN is very exciting to me, I've actually had the privilege of working on the last three Mars orbiters that NASA has sent to Mars.
Some of the aspects of how we're actually going to control the spacecraft are really
going to build off of the techniques that we've used on those past missions.
Habenicht: I think that exploration is just exciting. It is extremely cool that we're going to Mars.
MAVEN is going to be looking at the atmosphere to understand what's changed, and what is going to change,
and it has implications for our future travels to Mars, and it also has implications for us back on Earth.
Mitchell: Well MAVEN is a really exciting mission to me, I've been involved in Mars research now for fifteen years,
but I've never been involved in a mission like MAVEN that has the full suite of instruments.
It's a wonderful opportunity to really get at some of those questions that have been
in my mind now for years, and now we'll finally have the tools to answer them.
Beutelschies: A lot of us engineers, when we were kids that's what we dreamed about, right, going to other planets,
so this really is kind of at the forefront of exploration.
One thing exciting about MAVEN is we've done a lot of missions staring at the surface,
but now we're going to look at the atmosphere of Mars, and every time we go to Mars we discover something new.
Jakosky: MAVEN is the next logical step in the progression of understanding Mars.
It really addresses questions that are fundamental to Mars and to the ability of the planet to support life.
Everything we see is going to be a first-time measurement and a fundamental discovery.
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