When Mars was a young planet, water flowed along its surface and a thick atmosphere kept the temperature warm. Something happened, however, to cause the atmosphere to thin, desiccating the planet and turning it to a cold, lifeless shell of its former self. Fast forward billions of years to Monday, Nov. 18, and the inhabitants of Mars’ neighbor, Earth, have just launched the latest NASA space mission MAVEN to solve that mystery.

“We’re 14,000 miles from Earth and heading out to the red planet now,” said David Mitchell, MAVEN’s project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., at a post-launch briefing Monday.

MAVEN launched with tools designed by scientists to make extremely fine measurements of the red planet’s upper atmosphere composition. This will include where losses in the atmosphere happen and measurements of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation and energetic particles to determine how much they drive the loss of the atmosphere.

Once it has completed its year of gathering measurements, scientists will analyze it to answer what changes influenced Mars’ habitability in ancient history. Scientists hope that uncovering this information will enable them to determine what factors influence the potential for other planets in distant solar systems to hold life.

Pending the success of a course-correction maneuver, scientists will activate all the instruments on MAVEN in early December to ensure they are all functional and survived the launch. Once everything is confirmed, the scientists will shut the instruments back off for the remainder of MAVEN’s 10-month journey.

Before they turn those instruments off, however, the scientists want to first make some observations of the sun as MAVEN makes its journey. One of the instruments on the space craft is an Ultraviolet Imaging Spectograph, which the team wants to use to inspect the comet ISON as it makes its close encounter to the sun on November 28. The comet will reach within 740,000 miles of the sun and then make a turn back out into the solar system, where it will pass into MAVEN’s view and allow for some images.

“Many of the same gases that are present in Mars’ atmosphere are also present in comets,” said Nick Schneider, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the MAVEN science team, during a briefing on Sunday.

If MAVEN performs as expected and no mishaps arise, scientists expect the spacecraft to begin orbiting the Mars on Sept. 22, 2014.