By Tim Clifford

On Sep.21 the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) space craft successfully inserted itself into Mars’s orbit to begin collecting data. During the NASA Social event the 25 participants from around the U.S. Including me, Tim Clifford,were given a tour of the Laboratory for Atmospheric Space and Physics (LASP) in Boulder on the University of Colorado campus and the Lockheed Martin Facility in Littleton, Colorado.

During the day NASA scientists and engineers discussed space science, Mars, manned and unmanned space travel and the future of the space race. Here is some of the most exciting information gathered while attending the NASA social event:

• MAVEN was launched in November of 2013, in a very specific launch window as Mars had approached an optimal position in the solar system for MAVEN to insert itself into its orbit 10 months later, on Sep. 21 this year. The trajectory of the space craft made it so that Mars was literally coming up behind it and after a 35 minute rocket burn it was “caught” in the orbit of Mars.

• It has been confirmed by Nick Schneider, the IUVS lead scientist at LASP on MAVEN, that data has already been collected and sent back to Earth. NASA is planning to announce its findings in the coming days.

• MAVEN weighed the same as a GMC Yukon SUV, and with its wings spread was as long as a school bus. Chief engineer for MAVEN at Lockheed Martin Tim Priser described the craft by saying “it sort of looks like the Karate Kid”.

• MAVEN carried 450 gallons of fuel on its 442 million mile journey to Mars. It burned roughly 250 gallons in its 35 minute rocket burn to achieve insertion into Martian orbit. It takes approximately 50 gallons of fuel to keep MAVEN running per year.

• Radio waves travel at the same speed as light. From the Earth to Mars it takes 12.4 minutes for sunlight reflected from Mars to reach earth. This means that any messages sent to MAVEN take 12.4 minutes to reach it and vice versa.

• Once MAVEN’s yearlong (by Earth standards) mission of data gathering is done and the fuel has burned out MAVEN will continue to gather science data and will also act as a relay for the Curiosity rover and other future Mars missions.

• MAVEN, while not the first NASA space craft to go to Mars, is the first to specifically study the atmosphere of Mars. Spectrographs and other specifically tuned instruments will read the gas and particle emissions from the planet in the atmosphere. The amount of loss of CO2, N2, and H20 throughout Mars’s history will be recorded. This data will help scientists to understand what specifically caused the water that once covered Mars to disappear from its surface and to discover how the atmosphere changed so drastically.

• A true “camera” was not installed on MAVEN due to weight concerns.

• MAVEN is not alone in its Martian orbit. The Indian Space Research Organization successfully reached Mars with their MOM (Mars Orbiter Mission, or in Hindi Mangalyaan for “Mars-Craft”) space craft on Sep.23. The MOM craft will be studying the weather of Mars and will be able to detect one gas that the MAVEN craft won’t: methane. Traces of methane would suggest biological life, most likely microbial, may have existed on Mars. NASA and the ISRO plan to exchange data and cooperate with one another.

• MAVEN will be used to observe the comet Siding Spring as it passes by Mars in October. Scientists are still trying to ascertain what distance would be best so that dust and debris from Siding Spring do not destroy the instruments on MAVEN.

• Once question that was brought up at the NASA Social event was “how many women worked on MAVEN?” While literally hundreds of scientists and engineers “touched” MAVEN there was a strong enough female presence in all stages of the process that NASA organized a “Women of MAVEN” photo op just before launch in Florida last year.

• Aluminum is the preferred metal for all NASA space crafts.

• An interesting employee perk of working for the Lockheed Martin Facility in Littleton, nestled in the signature hills and mesa of Colorado on 500 plus acres, is that employees are allowed to pasture their horses on the property. In fact inside the highly secured compound one will find deer, elk, turkey, horses and even bear roaming free in the hills, roads and even the parking lots.

• A portion of the Lockheed Martin property was turned into a mock recreation of Mars’s surface for the Mars rovers to practice on. The practice area was eventually scrapped due to the annual cost of weed killing formula that was needed to stop overgrowth.

• A tour of a clean room containing the OSIRIS-REx and InSight space crafts was given. The pictures taken during this event were the public’s first ever look at the InSight Mars land rover, which is set to launch in 2016. The OSIRIS-Rex craft will attempt to land on the asteroid Bennu, drill into it and send a sample back to Earth.

• NASA has stated that a possible timeline for the first manned mission to Mars could take place in the 2030’s. However with the recent privatization of space travel and the recent contracts to SpaceX and Boeing for shuttles to the International Space Station, it is completely possible that that timeline will be bumped up. Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal and SpaceX, has stated his ambitions to be the first person to live on Mars and has given a date of 2026 to start shuttling humans to Mars.