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[ music ]

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[ bell rings, dramatic music ]

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[ clapping and cheering ]

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[ inspirational music ]

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Jakosky: My name is Bruce Jakosky, I'm the Principal Investigator on the MAVEN mission,

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which means that I'm responsible for the implementation of the entire mission and getting the science results out of it.

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MAVEN is the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission.

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Our goal is to study the role that loss to space has played in the history of the atmosphere.

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At its peak we've had about 500 or 600 people working on the project.

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That's difficult in itself because the team is distributed around the country.

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Mitchell: Well an important part of the MAVEN mission is getting all the teams working together.

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We have partnerships spread across the country, starting with the University of Colorado LASP, with Lockheed Martin in Denver,

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University of California at Berkeley, with the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, of course Goddard Space Flight Center.

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What excites me about MAVEN is just the collaboration, it's been a tremendous experience to be working for a common goal.

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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.

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Some of the aspects of how we're actually going to control the spacecraft are really

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going to build off of the techniques that we've used on those past missions.

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Habenicht: I think that exploration is just exciting. It is extremely cool that we're going to Mars.

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MAVEN is going to be looking at the atmosphere to understand what's changed, and what is going to change,

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and it has implications for our future travels to Mars, and it also has implications for us back on Earth.

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Mitchell: Well MAVEN is a really exciting mission to me, I've been involved in Mars research now for fifteen years,

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but I've never been involved in a mission like MAVEN that has the full suite of instruments.

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It's a wonderful opportunity to really get at some of those questions that have been

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in my mind now for years, and now we'll finally have the tools to answer them.

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Beutelschies: A lot of us engineers, when we were kids that's what we dreamed about, right, going to other planets,

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so this really is kind of at the forefront of exploration.

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One thing exciting about MAVEN is we've done a lot of missions staring at the surface,

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but now we're going to look at the atmosphere of Mars, and every time we go to Mars we discover something new.

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Jakosky: MAVEN is the next logical step in the progression of understanding Mars.

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It really addresses questions that are fundamental to Mars and to the ability of the planet to support life.

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Everything we see is going to be a first-time measurement and a fundamental discovery.

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[ satellite beeping ]