It has been a year since American space agency NASA's newest mars probe MAVEN has been circling the Red Planet. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft arrived in orbit around the Red Planet on September 21, 2014.

The craft reached in the orbit of the Red Planet almost 10 months after it was launched off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. MAVEN endured a two-month checkout phase being in the orbit around Maras.

After the two-month duration of the craft started studying Mars' atmosphere, in an attempt to determine how fast the planet's air is escaping into space.

According to NASA officials, the information about the Red Planet will help them better understand how and when Mars shifted from a relatively warm and wet planet in the ancient past to the cold and dry planet.

The mission members said so far everything has been going well with the $671 million mission. All of systems and instruments of MAVEN are in good shape, they said.

MAVEN principal investigator Bruce Jakosky, of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, said, "We're obtaining an incredibly rich data set that is on track to answer the questions we originally posed for MAVEN and that will serve the planetary science community for a long time to come".

MAVEN's first year at Mars has been very busy. In October 2014, the craft survived the close approach with Comet Siding Spring, which zoomed within just 87,000 miles (139,500 kilometers) of the Red Planet's surface.

The craft has spotted auroral displays and discovered a strange dust cloud that extends from about 93 miles (150 km) above the planet's surface to an altitude of 190 miles (300 km).