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Cape Canaveral, Fla. • NASA's Maven spacecraft arrived at Mars late Sunday after a 442 million-mile journey that began nearly a year ago.
The robotic explorer slipped into orbit around the red planet, officials confirmed. Now the real work begins for the $671 million mission, the first dedicated to studying Mars' upper atmosphere.
Flight controllers in Colorado will spend the next six weeks adjusting Maven's bearings and instruments. Then Maven will start probing the upper atmosphere of Mars. The spacecraft will conduct its observations from orbit; it's not meant to land.
Maven will be the first spacecraft to focus on the upper atmosphere of Mars. Scientists believe the Martian atmosphere holds clues as to how Earth's neighbor went from being warm and wet billions of years ago to cold and dry. That early wet world may have harbored microbial life, a tantalizing question yet to be answered.