NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, second from left, gets a tour Monday of the progress on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Waterton Canyon. The mission is to launch in fall 2013. (Kristin Leigh Painter, The Denver Post)

NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver visited Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Jefferson County on Monday for a progress update on the next mission to Mars Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, a.k.a. MAVEN as well as the heat shield for Orion, the next human-carrying space mission.

"These are two of our prized missions," said Garver, a Colorado College graduate who is NASA's second in command. "(MAVEN) will allow us to continue to 'follow the water.' "

In addition to designing and building the MAVEN spacecraft, Lockheed Martin will operate mission control following its planned November 2013 launch.

Garver and her team suited up and toured the cleanroom where the orbiter is being assembled. Following a briefing by the team, NASA officials found the project to be on schedule and on budget.

MAVEN is what industry insiders call an orbiter, not a lander. The solar-powered spacecraft won't have a dramatic surface landing like Curiosity but will remain in the Red Planet's orbit while studying its atmosphere.

Scientists believe that Mars was possibly once habitable but that the sun stripped away 99 percent of its atmosphere, leaving a cold, dusty environment. MAVEN will be loaded with scientific instruments to measure the compositional change over a two-year period.

Colorado is also home to the mission's principal investigator, Bruce Jakosky, from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Between the university and Lockheed Martin, there are about 175 full-time jobs dedicated to MAVEN in Colorado.

"Those are jobs all the way from high-tech down to undergraduates," said Nick Schnei-der, MAVEN's ultraviolet-spectrometer lead at CU.

With future budgetary fears for NASA swirling, Garver outlined the agency's major priorities at a news conference Monday morning. No. 1, Garver said, is the Space Launch System deep-space missions which Orion falls under.

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NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver tours Lockheed Martin in Denver