International audienceThe MAVEN spacecraft launched in November 2013, arrived at Mars in September 2014, and completed commissioning and began its one-Earth-year primary science mission in November 2014. The orbiter’s science objectives are to explore the interactions of the Sun and the solar wind with the Mars magnetosphere and upper atmosphere, to determine the structure of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere and the processes controlling it, to determine the escape rates from the upper atmosphere to space at the present epoch, and to measure properties that allow us to extrapolate these escape rates into the past to determine the total loss of atmospheric gas to space through time. These results will allow us to determine the importance of loss to space in changing the Mars climate and atmosphere through time, thereby providing important boundary conditions on the history of the habitability of Mars. The MAVEN spacecraft contains eight science instruments (with nine sensors) that measure the energy and particle input from the Sun into the Mars upper atmosphere, the response of the upper atmosphere to that input, and the resulting escape of gas to space. In addition, it contains an Electra relay that will allow it to relay commands and data between spacecraft on the surface and Earth

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Abstract. The Electron Reflectometer (ER) on board Mars Global Surveyor measures the energy and angular distributions of solar wind electrons and ionospheric photoelectrons. These data can be used in conjunction with magnetometer data to probe Mars' crustal magnetic field and to study Mars' ionosphere and solar wind interaction. During aerobraking, ionospheric measurements were obtained in the northern hemisphere at high solar zenith angles (SZAs, typically -78ø). The ionopause was crossed at altitudes ranging from 180 km to over 800 km, with a median of 380 km. The 400-km-altitude polar mapping orbit allows observations at SZAs from 25 ø to 155 ø in both the northern and southern hemispheres. The near-planet ionosphere and magnetotail structure of the night hemisphere is dominated by the presence of intense crustal magnetic fields, which can exceed 200 nT at the spacecraft altitude. Closed field lines anchored to highly elongated crustal sources form "magnetic cylinders," which exclude solar wind plasma traveling up the magnetotail. When the spacecraft passes through one of these structures, the ER count rate falls to the instrumental background, representing an electron flux drop of at least two orders of magnitude. A map of these flux dropouts in longitude and latitude closely resembles a map of the crustal magnetic sources. When the crustal magnetic cylinders rotate into sunlight, they fill with ionospheric plasma. Since many of these crustal fields are locally strong enough to stand off the solar wind to altitudes well above 400 km, the ionosphere can extend much higher than would otherwise be possible in the absence of crustal fields. Even weak crustal fields may locally bias the median ionopause altitude, which provides an indirect method of detecting crustal fields using ER observations.

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