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Artist’s illustration of NASA’s MAVEN orbiter at Mars.
(Image credit: NASA GSFC)
After waiting out a planned two-week communication blackout, NASA is living to listen again for a Mars orbiter that abruptly went silent more than a month ago.
The renewed contact attempt for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, or MAVEN, comes after the tip of a solar conjunction today (Jan. 16) — a length when the sun sits between Earth and Mars and charged solar particles can intervene with or outrageous radio signals. Communications with spacecraft are typically suspended in the path of these events to avoid sending partial or distorted commands that may living off unintended, potentially dangerous behavior.
NASA misplaced contact with MAVEN on Dec. 6, after the spacecraft passed in the back of Mars — a routine maneuver in the path of which the planet temporarily and predictably blocks communications with Earth. When MAVEN emerged again, on the alternative hand, the agency’s Deep Space Community was unable to reconnect with it.
Telemetry acquired earlier than the blackout confirmed all programs operating normally, NASA said in a Dec. 9 statement. Then again, analysis of a fragment of tracking data recovered from Dec. 6 urged MAVEN “was rotating in an unexpected manner when it emerged from behind Mars” and was no longer in its planned orbit, NASA said in a Dec. 15 update.
MAVEN has remained silent since Dec. 6 despite repeated attempts to contact it, according to NASA. As part of the recovery effort, the Curiosity rover attempted twice to image MAVEN when it was expected to pass overhead, “but MAVEN was not detected,” the agency said in its most up to date update, issued Dec. 23.
On account of the solar conjunction, NASA paused communications with all Mars missions on Dec. 29 and planned to restart them on Jan. 16.
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“We will start looking again, but at this point it’s looking very unlikely that we are going to be able to recover the spacecraft,” Louise Prockter, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said Jan. 13 in the path of a assembly of the Small Our bodies Assessment Community in Maryland, SpaceNews reported.
Launched in November 2013, MAVEN entered orbit around Mars in September 2014 to watch the planet’s upper atmosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. Originally designed to operate for dependable one year, MAVEN celebrated its Tenth anniversary in September 2024. The mission has helped scientists understand how Mars misplaced its as soon as-thick atmosphere, and has also composed broad data on Martian dirt storms, winds and auroras.
Past science, MAVEN plays a critical operational role as a communications relay, transmitting data between Earth and surface missions such as NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. While other orbiters — NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and Mars Specific — can also provide relay enhance, MAVEN carries a significant share of the communications workload.
With MAVEN offline, NASA said it has adjusted rover operations to count more heavily on the remaining orbiters, scheduling additional passes to enhance surface activities and enhancing daily plans for Curiosity and Perseverance to continue science operations.
MAVEN’s silence is particularly touching on given its historical past of technical challenges. In 2022, the spacecraft spent about three months in safe mode after problems with its onboard inertial measurement units, or IMUs, which resolve its orientation in space.
Following earlier issues with its primary IMU, the mission switched to a backup unit that skilled accelerated wear, leaving MAVEN unable to absolutely count on both gadget. To attenuate dependence on aging hardware, the mission team accelerated pattern of an “all-stellar” navigation mode, which allows MAVEN to orient itself by tracking stars. While much less exact than IMU-based navigation, the gadget is enough for routine operations, though not for delicate maneuvers.
The three-month outage and an extended recovery length in 2022 also compelled MAVEN to fail to notice observations of several highly efficient solar flares and temporarily restricted its role as a communications relay, reducing science output each from MAVEN and from Mars missions overall.
Despite its age, MAVEN has enough fuel to remain in orbit unless at least 2030, and the mission was formally extended in 2022 by September 2025.
If efforts to contact MAVEN continue to come back up empty, it may deal another blow to the Mars science community, which is already contending with the potential cancellation of the flagship Mars Sample Return program — a long-delayed mission designed to come back Martian rocks composed by the Perseverance rover and return them to Earth, with MAVEN supposed to learn as a crucial communications relay.
Sharmila Kuthunur is an self sustaining space journalist based in Bengaluru, India. Her work has also appeared in Scientific American, Science, Astronomy and Are living Science, among other publications. She holds a master’s stage in journalism from Northeastern College in Boston.
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