The resonance of the government shutdown earlier this month will be felt in every sector of the government, not excluding NASA, which almost missed its launch window to Mars. Thanks to a special exemption two days into the shutdown, the program has made up the lost time and looks as though it will be able to make the scheduled Nov. 18 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station after all.

“We’re just three weeks away,” said David Mitchell, Maven project manager from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, during a news briefing Monday at NASA headquarters. “We’re on the doorstep of going to Mars.”

Short for “Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution,” the Maven mission will be the first to study the planet’s upper atmosphere as well as any history of climate change. More importantly, Maven could serve for a decade as a communications relay for current and future rovers and landers working on the surface of Mars. It was that communications capability that convinced the government to allow the Maven mission to continue during the shutdown.

Previous missions to Mars showed that it once had liquid water flowing on its surface as well as a thick atmosphere, which kept the planet warm and possibly allowed it to hold microbial life.

“But somehow, that atmosphere changed over time to the cold, dry environment that we see today, one that is too cold, with an atmosphere too thin to be able to support liquid water,” said Bruce Jakosky, the mission’s principal investigator from University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. “What we don’t know is what the driver of that change has been.”

Scientists have made hypotheses, including that the planet’s crust could have absorbed the atmospheric gases. However, it will take the Maven space mission to make more definitive answers.

Once it reaches Mars, the Maven spacecraft will spend a year orbiting the red planet and observe how it reacts to solar activity as well as the atmospheric composition. The information collected will help scientists better understand the history of the atmosphere and determine what caused that dramatic change.

The NASA scientists predict that a Nov. 18 launch at 1:28 p.m. will have the Maven spacecraft orbiting Mars starting Sept. 22 next year. “It’s been a great journey so far, and we’ve got a long way to go, but we’re on track,” said Mitchell.