BERKELEY — NASA this week gave the green light to a mission to Mars that will seek to understand why and how the red planet lost its atmosphere 3-4 billion years ago.

Dubbed the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission, it is led by principal investigator Bruce Jakosky of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder) and managed by David Mitchell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

More than half the instruments aboard the spacecraft, with a planned launch in late 2013, will be built at the University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) under the direction of MAVEN deputy-principal investigator Robert Lin. 

Read more at http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2010/10/07_maven.shtml