On December 6, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft, which has been studying the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere for more than a decade, mysteriously went offline.
The spacecraft is expected to send telemetry data back to Earth that have never been picked up by NASA’s Deep Space Network, the global system of large radio antennas that make up the interplanetary communications network.
Less than a week later, NASA released a new update, acknowledging that MAVEN “appeared to be spinning in an unexpected way as it emerged from behind Mars.” Then, on December 23, the agency released a final update, promising that it would “continue efforts to reconnect” with the missing spacecraft.
But weeks later, things weren’t looking much better. as space news Senior writer Jeff Foster noted that Louise Proctor, director of NASA’s planetary science division, admitted at Tuesday’s meeting that it was “highly unlikely” the agency would recover the MAVEN orbiter.
Not all hope is lost. The conjunction of Mars and Earth on opposite sides of the sun will last for several weeks and will end on January 16, providing NASA with new opportunities to reconnect.
NASA explained in its latest update on December 23 that the MAVEN team is trying to “create a timeline of possible events and identify possible root causes of the issue” by analyzing “snippets of tracking data recovered from the December 6 radio science event.”
NASA also tried to take photos of MAVEN using the mast camera installed on its Curiosity rover, but was unable to spot the missing spacecraft.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but luckily there are three other spacecraft that can still relay communications between the Mars mission and Earth. A next-generation orbiter known as the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter was also recently resurrected in President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” bill — though it’s unclear when it will launch.
For now, all we can hope is that NASA’s efforts to reconnect with MAVEN will be successful once it emerges from behind Mars again. But in light of Proctor’s latest comments, things don’t look good.
More information about Maven: NASA’s Mars spacecraft spins helplessly after signal loss
