NASA's MAVEN Orbiter

MAVEN Orbiter / NASA At 10:24 pm EDT on Sunday, NASA's MAVEN spacecraft arrived in orbit around Mars. MAVEN, which stands for Mars Atmo...

MAVEN Orbiter / NASA

At 10:24 pm EDT on Sunday, NASA's MAVEN spacecraft arrived in orbit around Mars. MAVEN, which stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, is a probe designed to explore the upper atmosphere of Mars in order to learn more about it. 

The spacecraft launched on Monday, November 18, 2013, taking about 10 months to get to the Red Planet. “As the first orbiter dedicated to studying Mars’ upper atmosphere, MAVEN will greatly improve our understanding of the history of the Martian atmosphere, how the climate has changed over time, and how that has influenced the evolution of the surface and the potential habitability of the planet,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a press release. 

MAVEN Orbiter / NASA

For the next six weeks, the spacecraft will be undergoing a series of tests to maneuver into its proper orbit and to ensure that all of its instruments are working properly. It will then begin its one-year mission to explore the Martian atmosphere. "It's taken 11 years from the original concept for MAVEN to now having a spacecraft in orbit at Mars,” Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN's principal investigator said in the release. “I'm delighted to be here safely and successfully, and looking forward to starting our science mission.

The goal of the science mission specifically is to learn more about the composition of the Martian atmosphere and how it interacts with solar wind and other phenomena. The probe will also measure how fast gasses are escaping from Mars' slowly thinning atmosphere. When those rates are measured, scientists hope to be able to reconstruct the Martian atmosphere as it existed thousands or millions of years ago. 

Those reconstructions could help determine if the conditions existed for life to exist on ancient Mars. The MAVEN probe will also have company soon - India's Mars Orbiter mission is scheduled to enter into Martian orbit this week. That probe also launched in November of 2013, and is loaded with scientific instruments to study the Red Planet. 

If it successfully enters orbit, India's space agency will become the fourth to successfully send a probe to Mars, after the U.S., Russian, and the European space agencies.