After a 10-month journey in space, the NASA Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft successfully entered the orbit of Mars on Sunday night, with the sole mission of studying the upper atmosphere to answer fundamental questions about the Red Planet.

“As the first orbiter dedicated to studying Mars’ upper atmosphere, MAVEN will greatly improve our understanding of the history of the Martian atmosphere, how the climate has changed over time, and how that has influenced the evolution of the surface and the potential habitability of the planet,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, in a recent statement. “It also will better inform a future mission to send humans to the Red Planet in the 2030s.”

According to NASA, the next step for MAVEN will be to enter a six-week phase of testing its instruments and science-mapping commands before beginning a yearlong mission of measuring the structure and composition of Mars’ upper atmosphere. Additional goals include analyzing the escape of gases in the upper atmosphere as well as determining its interactions with the sun and solar wind.

MAVEN carries three instrument packages to aid in the yearlong mission, according to the statement. The Particles and Fields Package, provided by the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP), and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, includes six instruments to examine solar wind and the ionosphere of the planet.

The Remote Sensing Package, also provided by CU/LASP, will aid in the observation of characteristics in the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by the Goddard Space Flight Center, will also analyze the planet’s atmospheric composition as well as the isotopes of atomic particles.

The spacecraft was launched on Nov. 18, 2013, at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. “This was a very big day for MAVEN,” said project manager David Mitchell. “We’re very excited to join the constellation of spacecraft in orbit at Mars and on the surface of the Red Planet. The commissioning phase will keep the operations team busy for the next six weeks, and then we’ll begin, at last, the science phase of the mission. Congratulations to the team for a job well done today.”