University of Colorado at Boulder
News Release

CU-Boulder Proposal Selected As Finalist For Mission To Probe Past
Climate Of Mars

January 8, 2007

NASA has selected a team led by the University of Colorado at Boulder
as
one of two finalists for an orbiting space mission slated to launch in
2011 to probe the past climate of Mars, including its potential for
harboring life over the eons.

The team, led by CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space
Physics, will receive $2 million from NASA for a nine-month "Phase A"
study for the proposed Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission,
or MAVEN.

MAVEN was proposed as part of NASA's Scout Program, which has a cost
cap
of $475 million. The second proposal selected for further study is led
by the Boulder office of the Southwest Research Institute,
headquartered
in San Antonio. The winning proposal is expected to be selected for
flight in about one year.

The CU-Boulder proposal includes a spacecraft with 10 instruments that
will focus on the upper atmosphere of Mars, said LASP Associate
Director
Bruce Jakosky, principal investigator for MAVEN. LASP would have
overall
responsibility for the mission, including providing two instruments and
half of a third instrument. LASP also would provide science operations
for the mission and managing the education and outreach program, he
said.

Partners on the LASP proposal include NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center
in Greenbelt, Md., Lockheed Martin Corp. of Denver, the University of
California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. Lockheed Martin
would provide the spacecraft, as well as mission operations, for the
MAVEN mission.

"We think we have proposed a first-rate mission with outstanding
science
and outstanding partners, and are extremely excited about the NASA
announcement," said Jakosky, an internationally known Mars expert.
"Scientists have a lot of questions about the loss of water and carbon
dioxide from the Martian atmosphere over time, which have implications
for the possibility of past or present life there."

LASP Director Daniel Baker, one of the science team members on MAVEN,
described it as "a telescope-microscope mission that will allow
scientists to piece together an entire picture of the Martian
atmosphere. We want to better understand how the Mars atmosphere
evolved, its present state, and what we might see happening there in
the
future," he said.

The MAVEN science team includes three LASP scientists heading
instrument
teams -- Nicholas Schneider, Frank Eparvier and Robert Ergun -- as well
as a large supporting team of scientists, engineers and mission
operations specialists.

If selected for flight, MAVEN would include participation by a number
of
CU-Boulder graduate and undergraduate students in the coming years,
said
LASP faculty member Fran Bagenal, a member of the MAVEN science team.
Currently there are more than 100 undergraduate and graduate students
working on research projects at LASP, providing training for future
careers as engineers and scientists, she said.

The MAVEN effort also would bring together undergraduate data teams
from
across the nation to help analyze mission results, Baker said.

Multiple lines of evidence suggest that Mars lost most of its
atmosphere
several billion years ago, said Jakosky. The MAVEN orbiter would study
current atmospheric loss with emphasis on the role of the solar wind,
including its rapidly moving charged particles and magnetic field that
may be responsible in large part for the current atmospheric conditions
on the Red Planet, he said.

NASA's Mars Exploration Program was designed to help characterize and
understand Mars as a dynamic system, including its present and past
environment, climate cycles, geology and biological potential. The Mars
Exploration Program is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif.

Contact: Bruce Jakosky, (303) 492-8004
Fran Bagenal, (303) 492-2598
Frank Eparvier, (303) 492-4546
Emily CoBabe Amman, (303) 735-5814
Jim Scott (303) 492-3114