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[music] Bruce Jakosky: We've never sent a spacecraft to Mars just to explore its
upper atmosphere. If you imagine Mars as having had a thicker,
warmer atmosphere earlier in its history, where did the atmosphere go? Where
did the water go? And there are only two places it can go--the atmosphere can go down
or it can go up and be lost to space. MAVEN is
the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN Mission. We're trying to understand
basically why the climate changed on Mars--why Mars appears
to have gone from an environment that was habitable--to microorganisms,
at least--to one that is the cold, dry, uninhabitable environment
we see today. By looking at the nature of the upper
atmosphere today, and how gases can be lost out of the atmosphere
to space today, we learn about the processes that control the
atmosphere, and we're gonna have a good understanding of what the history of
the atmosphere has been. [music]
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