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[ drone ]

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[ music ]

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My name is Nick Schneider. I'm the science lead for the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph on the MAVEN mission,

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and I'm a member of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.

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My name is Ian Stewart. I'm a senior research scientist here at LASP.

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Right now I'm working with the IUVS team on the MAVEN mission to Mars.

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So the philosophy of NASA's Mars Program has been "Follow the water,"

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but "Where did the atmosphere go?" is still a lingering question,

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and so MAVEN is designed to figure out whether or not that atmosphere could have escaped away to space.

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The MAVEN payload, all of the instruments on it are designed to examine the processes by which gases escape from Mars.

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When we look at the ultraviolet light we can tell what the atmosphere is composed of.

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We can also tell its temperature, measure variations in the composition and temperature as we look at

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different parts of the atmosphere, at different seasons on Mars, different times of day.

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The Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph is the most powerful ultraviolet spectrograph to be sent to another planet.

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It's got a very high spectral resolution that allows us to look very closely at an emission from hydrogen,

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and we look so closely that we can tell the difference between hydrogen and heavy hydrogen, called deuterium.

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And by measuring the ratio of heavy hydrogen to light hydrogen

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we can get a good guess of just how much water has escaped from the planet.

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Now this has been done before in the lower atmosphere but it's never been done in the upper atmosphere

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where the escape is actually occurring, so that's going to be a first for MAVEN.

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I've worked on many planetary missions all the way back to Mariner 6 and 7.

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At the beginning of my scientific career that's what I worked on, on Mars, and so here I'm almost at the end,

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and it's a real pleasure to go back to Mars and study it in more detail asking better questions.