MAVEN's Martian Legacy
NASA's MAVEN Mars Orbiter Mission Ends After Eleven Years, Leaving Vital Atmospheric Data
NASA has officially ended the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, losing contact with the spacecraft after it experienced an unexpected loss of signal following its passage behind Mars in December and was unable to be recovered. An anomaly review board convened in February determined MAVEN is not recoverable and can no longer perform its science and communications role. Prior telemetry showed subsystems operating normally, but after MAVEN emerged, the Deep Space Network detected no signal; limited recorded telemetry indicated it went into safe mode and spun at an unusually high rate, draining its batteries and powering down its communications system. NASA says the full investigation is still ongoing and that a final report is expected later this year, even as the agency begins formal decommissioning and plans to archive the mission’s dataset. Launched in 2013, MAVEN was the first mission devoted to studying Mars’ atmosphere and how solar interactions strip it away, providing long-lasting insights for understanding the planet’s past habitability and the radiation environment relevant to future human exploration. The agency will host a media teleconference to review MAVEN’s achievements and legacy.
Key Points
NASA director Louise Prockter said MAVEN’s measurements are “key to informing what kind of radiation protection and safety measures we must take before sending humans to Mars,” adding that “The data collected from MAVEN will continue to provide valuable insight into Mars for decades to come.”
NASA scheduled a MAVEN media teleconference for 2 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 3, to discuss the mission’s achievements and legacy.
MAVEN’s science included observations of how major events affect atmospheric escape—during the 2018 global dust storm, researchers saw that dust-driven processes loft water molecules higher in the atmosphere, accelerating their escape into space.
The mission is also credited with an operations milestone: it holds the solar system record for “the most data relayed from another planet to Earth in a single 24-hour period.”
MAVEN reached Mars orbit in 2014 and operated for more than 11 years in orbit—roughly a decade beyond its original one-year primary mission.
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