MAVEN Launches

How can you communicate with Mars spacecraft when the Sun is in the way? Learn more about 'solar conjunction' in this 60-second video.

Conceptual image of wind (blue arrows) flowing over rugged Martian terrain and generating disturbances that propagate upward as atmospheric gravity waves (grey lines). 

Robert Lin, the late director of the Space Sciences Laboratory, discusses how NASA's MAVEN spacecraft will study the interaction of the Martian atmosphere with the solar wind. MAVEN's findings will...

This artist's concept depicts NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft orbiting Mars.

This animation shows a proton aurora at Mars. First, a solar wind proton approaches Mars at high speed and encounters a cloud of hydrogen surrounding the planet. 

The Atlas V rocket carrying the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft sits at the launch pad at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station after rolling out from Space Launch Co...

Crews guide NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, spacecraft, inside a payload fairing, into place atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at the Vertical Integration Facili...

A map of MAVEN's Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) auroral detections in December 2014 overlaid on Mars’ surface.

The Martian surface bears ample evidence of flowing water in its youth, from crater lakes and riverbeds to minerals that only form in water. But today Mars is cold and dry, and scientists think tha...

The first demonstration of NASA's MAVEN Mars orbiter's capability to relay data from a Mars surface mission, on Nov. 6, 2014, included this and other images from NASA's Curiosity Mars rover. The im...

The payload fairing for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft arrives at the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

This illustration shows the MAVEN spacecraft and the limb of Mars.

The MAVEN spacecraft structure is placed into a reaction chamber, where it completed a static loads test to ensure that it will withstand the extreme forces of launch.

Members of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) team celebrate at the Lockheed Martin operations center in Littleton, Colorado, Sunday night, after getting confirmation that the space...

The diagram explains the cause of Mars’ glowing nightside atmosphere. 

Mars was once on track to become a thriving Earth-like planet, yet today it is an apparently lifeless wasteland. A NASA spacecraft named MAVEN will soon journey to Mars to find out what went wrong ...

At Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the United Launch Alliance Centaur second stage is lifted for stacking atop its Atlas V first stage at Launch Pad 41 in preparation for the Mars Atmo...

The Remote Sensing package aboard the MAVEN spacecraft, was conceived, designed and built by the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP) at Boulder.

This is an artist's conception of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution MissioN (MAVEN) Mars orbiter.

The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station carrying the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft on a 1...

Interact with this 3D model of MAVEN.

This is an artist's conception of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution MissioN (MAVEN) Mars orbiter.

This image is a stereo, panoramic view of various trenches dug by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander. The images that make up this panorama were taken by Phoenix's Surface Stereo Imager at about 4 p.m., lo...

A full moon rises behind the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft onboard at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch...

This artist's concept shows the MAVEN spacecraft in orbit around the Red Planet, with a fanciful image of her home planet in the background.