[meteorite-list] MAVEN Update - August 2, 2013

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/maven/status.html

MAVEN Status
Spaceflight Now
August 2, 2013
1500 GMT (11 a.m. EDT; 9 a.m. MDT)

The MAVEN spacecraft is loaded inside its transport container on a flatbed 
trailer, and the one-ton spaceship has been pulled out its clean room 
at Lockheed Martin's satellite plant just outside of Denver.
The sensitive spacecraft, the centerpiece of a $453 million mission to 
probe the Martian atmosphere, will be continuously purged with pure nitrogen 
to keep the environment inside the container clean. The transport team, 
comprised of Lockheed Martin, NASA, and University of Colorado officials, 
says the temperature inside the box is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit with 
a humidity of less than 30 percent.

Those parameters are acceptable for shipment.

The box measures about 14 feet tall, 14 feet wide and 7.5 feet long.

The spacecraft will take a road trip to Buckley Air Force Base, where 
a U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo plane waits. Later this morning, technicians 
will offload the container with MAVEN and place it inside the C-17's cargo 
hold.

Guy Beutelschies, MAVEN's program manager at Lockheed Martin, says the 
company has shipped more than a half-dozen interplanetary spacecraft from 
Denver to Florida over the last 15 years. Much of the team has worked 
most or all of those operations, Beutelschies said.

 
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THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 2013

A NASA spacecraft set to launch to Mars this fall will take a cross-country 
plane ride Friday in the belly of a U.S. Air Force cargo jet, and we've 
been invited along for the ride.
It's an all-day ordeal, starting early Friday at Lockheed Martin's satellite 
factory in suburban Denver and ending Friday night at the Kennedy Space 
Center in Florida, where the Mars orbiter will be placed inside a clean 
room for final launch preparations.

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, or MAVEN, is the first 
spacecraft to be dispatched to the red planet specifically to study the 
desert world's thin atmosphere.

"We've never sent a spacecraft to Mars just to explore its upper atmosphere," 
said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN's chief scientist from the University of Colorado 
at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. "If you imagine 
Mars as having had a thicker, warmer atmosphere early in its history, 
where did the atmosphere ago? Where did the water go?"

The job of the $453 million MAVEN mission is to find out, answering one 
of the most fundamental questions about the red planet: Why did the climate 
change on Mars?

Built by Lockheed Martin, MAVEN will launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., 
on Nov. 18 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. If all goes 
well, the craft will slide into orbit around Mars in September 2014.

But before it rockets away to Mars, some logistics are in order - like 
moving the delicate custom-built spacecraft from Colorado to Florida.

An Air Force C-17 cargo plane will do the job, jetting MAVEN from a military 
base outside Denver to the Shuttle Landing Facility runway at KSC.

All along the way, MAVEN will be hooked up to a purge system to keep the 
satellite and its three sensor packages pristine during the journey. And 
several dozen Lockheed Martin engineers and technicians will accompany 
MAVEN on the trip to help load and unload the craft from the C-17 and 
babysit the orbiter.

It takes meticulous planning to pull off such a move in a single day, 
with every move carefully choreographed well in advance. We'll be there 
to chronicle the job, offering a look into a rarely-seen part of all space 
missions.

We'll be posting updates here throughout the day Friday and Saturday, 
when workers will open the crate housing MAVEN inside the KSC clean room.