MAVEN Ready To Launch Today

An anonymous reader writes "Mars seems to have gone from being a warm, wet planet with a liquid core (with magnetic fields strong enough to maintain an atmosphere) to a cooled frozen desert-like surface. By gathering information about the Mars upper atmosphere and its magnetic field scientists hope MAVEN can help explain what happened and where the water went."

Re:Pretty easy to speculate...

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect you mean the necessary mass to retain that heat. The radioactive decay present in the core would continue at the same rate it does on earth ... it's just that it would have started with less, and would still to this day have less. There will be radioactive decay till the end of time (or close enough), if there were radioactive elements present to start with.

Live Coverage

[Ashenkase]

http://spaceflightnow.com/atlas/av038/status.html

Any other links out there? I generally use Spaceflight Now for the text updats along with the live feed.

Re:Not Magnetic Fields

[wonkey_monkey]

No, but they do deflect the solar wind, which can contribute to atmospheric loss (but then there are other also interactions with the solar wind which make things more complicated).

Re:Pretty easy to speculate...

[olsmeister]

There is a theory that early in the Earth's history it was struck [wikipedia.org] by a Mars-sized body, blasting off a large portion of the crust and mantle (incidentally forming the moon) and leaving behind a relatively large metal-rich core.