Q&A with UNC astronomy professor Aaron LaCluyze

NASA has been launching satellites into Mars’ orbit for more than a decade, the most recent of which entered Mars’ orbit on Sept. 21. MAVEN is the first satellite designed to study the upper atmosphere of the planet.

Staff writer Sara Svehla talked to Aaron LaCluyze,  a UNC astronomy professor and researcher for Skynet, a global network of robotic telescopes.

DAILY TAR HEEL: Do you know any background on the recent launch?

AARON LACLUYZE: For a while, a third of probes that were sent to Mars was unsuccessful. Now there’s MAVEN, the Mars Reconnaissance, which is going on year number nine, and the Mars Odyssey, which is going on year number 13. Right now Odyssey and Reconnaissance are primarily used as communication satellites with the rovers on the surface.

DTH: What are MAVEN’s research goals?

AL: It’s looking primarily at Mars’ atmosphere, focusing on the atmospheric composition, how that’s changed over time, and how Mars lost its atmosphere.

Mars had a breathable, life-sustaining atmosphere earlier than Earth did. If life evolved in the early solar system, it could have evolved on Mars much earlier than it evolved on Earth. We want to know how the gases on Mars escaped from the atmosphere and how long it took.

DTH: Is the MAVEN more advanced than other probes?

AL: It does have different instruments. It’s newer by nearly a decade so it has higher precision and higher resolution instruments. MAVEN is in a highly elliptical orbit, so it comes in really close to the planet, and then it goes really far out.

DTH: How would this information help us?

AL: Our goal is to one day explore Mars with human beings, and when we send people there, we should have a pretty good handle on the sorts of conditions they’re going to encounter and how those conditions came about. We can use models to figure out what it used to be like, what the compositions of gases were, and when we ask questions like could life have evolved on Mars, we can answer that question.

DTH: When did NASA start this project?

AL: It was approved in 2008. It took just over ten months to get into orbit and it arrived in orbit about three days ago. Its mission life span is one year.

DTH: Do you think it’s possible to put astronauts on Mars?

AL: Absolutely. Getting astronauts onto Mars is easy; getting astronauts back from Mars is hard. There are speculations afoot that we send a one-way trip to Mars. Funding is a big issue. If you give us enough of a budget, we can totally do it in a relatively short time.

DTH: Do you think the American space exploration program is falling behind?

AL: I wouldn’t necessarily say that we’re falling behind, but I will say that other countries are catching up quickly. Both China and India have active space programs. There is an Indian space probe that should be arriving soon, which is great. The more the merrier. We as a country have decided through our political process that space exploration is not a focus for us. We are at risk of no longer being a space superpower.