MAVEN Mars Mission declared dead after six months of silence

MAVEN Artist’s concept of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft at Mars. The spacecraft entered orbit around the planet in 2014 and has completed over eleven years of observing the Martian upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and interactions with the Sun and solar wind to explore the loss of the Red Planet’s atmosphere to space. (NASA/Goddard/University of Colorado/Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics)

By Natalie Dreier, Cox Media Group National Content Desk

NASA’s MAVEN mission is dead, the space agency said, citing a six-month period of silence from the spacecraft.

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NASA said the mission was the first devoted to observing Mars’s atmosphere and its evolution.

It had been in orbit around the red planet for 11 years, a decade longer than its planned one-year mission.

The last message received from the spacecraft came on Dec. 6, when it experienced an unexpected loss of signal after passing behind Mars, NASA said in a news release.

Prior to losing its signal, the subsystems were functioning as expected, but after it came back from the far side of the planet, the Deep Space Network did not receive a signal. It was determined that radio signals recorded by the DSN open-loop receivers indicated that MAVEN was in safe mode and rotating at an unusually high rate, suggesting a problem with its orbital trajectory.

An anomaly review board said the MAVEN’s batteries had drained, causing communication to stop.

The board considered the spacecraft’s recovery and probable current state, but determined it was not recoverable.

The MAVEN documented the sun’s impact on Mars, light shows on the planet, how Mars lost its atmosphere, and how global dust storms affected the planet, and more, NASA said.

“The MAVEN mission has truly advanced our understanding of the Martian atmosphere and evolution. This dataset has had a tremendous impact on the field,” Shannon Curry, MAVEN’s principal investigator and a researcher at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement. “Our science team is exceptionally proud of all of these amazing discoveries.”