In three weeks, NASA is set to launch its Maven orbiter to Mars, where it will study the Red Planet's upper atmosphere.

NASA is putting the finishing touches on its next Mars mission, which is slated to launch toward the Red Planet just three weeks from today (Oct. 28).

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The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft, or Maven for short, is due to lift off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Nov. 18. Maven is designed to study the Red Planet's upper atmosphere in great detail, and mission scientists hope the probe's observations yield insights into howMarsshifted from a relatively warm, wet world in the ancient past to the cold and dry place we know today.

"The Maven mission is a significant step toward unraveling the planetary puzzle about Mars' past and present environments," NASA science chief John Grunsfeld said in a statement. "The knowledge we gain will build on past and current missions examining Mars and will help inform future missions to send humans to Mars." [NASA's Maven Mission to Mars (Photos)]

Maven's journey will begin atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. The probe will then endure a 10-month cruise to Mars, arriving in orbit around the Red Planet in September 2014.

The $671 millionMaven missionwill spend at least one Earth year studying Mars' air with three different instrument suites. Scientists hope Maven's observations reveal details about how the Red Planet lost much of its atmosphere, which was once relatively thick but is now just 1 percent as dense as that of Earth.

Maven will not be able to probe the Red Planet's air for methane, a gas whose presence could be a sign of potential Martian lifeforms. (About 90 percent of the methane in Earth's atmosphere is biologically derived, scientists say.)

"We just had to leave that one off to stay focused and to stay within the available resources," Maven principal investigator Bruce Jakosky, of the University of Colorado, Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, told reporters today.

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NASA to launch mission to study Martian atmosphere