A veteran spacecraft has sniffed the Martian atmosphere for the last time. More than a decade after the MAVEN orbiter arrived on Mars and six months after its unexpected silence, NASA has officially declared the mission complete.
With this, NASA loses a cutting-edge scientific resource and a crucial link in the communications network between rovers on Mars and scientists on Earth.
“The conclusion is that the spacecraft is not salvageable,” project manager Mike Moreau of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said at a news conference. June 3 press conference. “The team really experienced the loss of someone close to them with the end of the mission here. »
MAVEN (for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) contacted Earth for the last time in December 2025, shortly before passing behind Mars. When she appeared, the satellite dishes couldn’t find her signal. Fragments of data received on December 6 suggest that the spacecraft was spinning at about 2.7 revolutions per minute, when it should not have been spinning at all.
“Any kind of rotation was abnormal,” Moreau said. A review board convened in February determined that the spin had drained the batteries, cutting off power to the spacecraft’s communications. The root cause of the rotation is still under investigation.
MAVEN entered the orbit of Mars in September 2014 to discover how the climate of the Red Planet has changed over time. It is the orbit periodically took it to “deep immersions” inside the upper layers of Mars’ atmosphere.
One of his most important discoveries is that the solar wind, a continuous stream of charged particles from the sun, constantly eliminates gas molecules of the atmosphere of Mars. Without a planetary-scale magnetic field to protect it, like Earth, the Red Planet loses about 100 grams of atmosphere every second.
During a solar stormwhen the sun emits plasma flares and energetic blasts, this leak rate increases by approximately a factor of 10. The sun gave off more flares when he was youngerso Mars probably lost its atmosphere even more quickly in the past.
MAVEN too measured atmospheric sprayin which heavy ions plunge into the atmosphere and project lighter, neutral molecules. This was the first time that spraying had been observed directly on a planet.
“We now understand atmospheric escape on Mars better than on any other planet, including Earth,” MAVEN principal investigator Shannon Curry, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, said at the news conference.
This escape largely explains why Mars appears to have been much more more hospitable to life in the past – although there is still no clear evidence that life took hold there.
“The mission provided the strongest evidence yet for why Mars transitioned from a warm, humid world (capable of supporting liquid water) to the cold, dry environment it is today,” said geoscientist Vicky Hamilton of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
MAVEN also discovered new types of aurora on Mars. He coordinated with the Perseverance rover to achieve the first observation of an aurora from the surface of Marsgiving an idea of what these light shows might look like to future human visitors. And he observed how a global dust storm in 2018 water molecules thrown high into the atmosphereletting more of them escape.
MAVEN was a “key component” of NASA and the European Space Agency’s five-satellite program. Mars Relay Networksaid Tiffany Morgan, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. The rovers have adapted to four satellites, although there are now occasional delays.
“MAVEN has been instrumental in obtaining scientific data, as opposed to operational data,” Morgan said. “But the Mars Relay network is currently resilient enough to cope with the loss of MAVEN.”
NASA plans to build a new telecommunications network on Mars to provide “continuous communications in support of a Mars sample return mission and future Mars surface, orbital and human exploration missions,” the agency wrote in a statement. request for proposals in May. But it may not be ready before 2030, or even later.
Meanwhile, the existing network satellites are between 10 and 25 years old. These aging assets are vulnerable to cancellation by an agency seeking to reduce costs. “Our Martian infrastructure is becoming more fragile every year,” says planetary scientist Briony Horgan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Hamilton notes that missions to the surface of Mars must now rely on Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. “But their future is currently threatened by NASA’s proposed budget.”
