One of NASA's workhorses spacecraft in orbit around Mars went silent, leaving agency staff scrambling to fix the problem.
The Mars Atmosphere and Unstable Evolution (MAVEN) mission was launched in November 2013 and has been operating on the Red Planet since September 2014. Like many NASA missions, MAVEN survived well beyond its original design life of one year. But on December 6, something apparently went wrong while the spacecraft was on the far side of Mars, the side of the planet that faces away from Earth.
“MAVEN telemetry showed that all subsystems were operating normally before it entered orbit beyond the Red Planet,” NASA representatives wrote in a statement. published December 9. “After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA's Deep Space Network did not detect the signal.”
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The main scientific goal of the MAVEN mission was to study the Martian atmosphere and how it is affected by the solar wind—the constant flow of charged particles that emanate from our Sun and cross space.
As a secondary mission, the spacecraft also serves as one of four spacecraft that relay communications between Earth and missions on the surface of Mars; specifically, these missions include Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. Most of these transmissions are handled by the European Space Agency's (ESA) Exomars Trace Gas Orbiter, which arrived at Mars in 2016, followed by the legacy MAVEN. Two even older NASA spacecraft – Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and 2001's “Martian Odyssey” – they teamed up to complete the relay work. ESA's Mars Express is also available as a backup.
MAVEN's problems highlight the fact that even the newest member of the network has already been operating in space for nearly a decade, increasing the risk of multiple cascading failures.
Recognizing the dangers of stretching this network too thin, NASA has been developing various next-generation orbiters to communicate with Mars for decades, but most of these projects have come to nothing. One such scheme, tentatively called the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, was first conceived more than 20 years ago and subsequently cancelled. Then it was revived earlier this year with $700 million as part of the Trump administration's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Even if the mission succeeds, it will be years away from launch. Meanwhile, MAVEN is built into the agency's support plans Returning a sample from Marsan already troubled mission to collect rock samples collected by the Perseverance rover.
This latest failure is not the first time MAVEN has given NASA a major scare. In 2022, the mission spent three months in safe mode, which occurs when the spacecraft has a problem that it cannot solve on its own. This potentially fatal problem was caused by the spacecraft's inertial measurement units, which keep MAVEN in the correct orientation. Ultimately, the mission team had to update the spacecraft with an entirely new program to maintain stability.
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