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NASA has announced that its MAVEN orbiter is finished, closing the book on a Mars mission that ran more than 11 years before the agency lost contact with the spacecraft last December.
Getting into it: In a statement, NASA confirmed its final contact with the orbiter came on December 6, right as the spacecraft headed into one of its regular trips behind Mars. Those passes knock out contact for 20 to 30 minutes at a stretch, but this time MAVEN went quiet and stayed that way. Once it cleared the far side of the planet, NASA’s Deep Space Network couldn’t catch any signal, and months of rescue attempts, including forced computer reboots that ran through the end of 2025 and a sweep by a West Virginia radio telescope in January, all came up empty.
Back in February, NASA put together an anomaly review board to get to the bottom of it. Engineers managed to pull a few scraps of telemetry off the craft, and the data showed something was off, because when MAVEN came back around the planet, it was tumbling at about 2.7 rotations a minute. The orbiter isn’t designed to spin at all, so that reading flagged a serious problem. The spin is thought to have drained its batteries and cut power to the communications gear, leaving it stranded in safe mode with no way back. The board still hasn’t nailed down what set it off in the first place, and its final report isn’t due until later this year.
Over its life, MAVEN cranked out more than 800 science papers, watched solar storms claw away at the Martian atmosphere, caught new types of auroras lighting up across the planet instead of just near the poles, and even grabbed images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS last year. It also handled the less flashy job of bouncing data from NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers back to Earth.
Shannon Curry, the mission’s lead investigator at the University of Colorado Boulder, summed it up when a reporter asked what belonged on MAVEN’s headstone. “Best Mars mission ever,” she said.
