Fresh From Capturing Image Of 3I/ATLAS, NASA’s MAVEN Suffers “Anomaly” And Is No Longer Communicating With Earth

In November 2013, NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft launched into space, beginning its long journey to Mars. In September 2014, it entered Mars’s orbit, and began its mission to study the planet’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and the interactions the atmosphere has with the solar wind, leading to its escape of the Martian atmosphere.

For over a decade, it has taken measurements of the Martian atmosphere and relayed those findings to Earth via the Deep Space Network, NASA’s international array of giant radio antennas that communicates with interplanetary missions. This year, for example, the spacecraft detected the first direct signs of “sputtering”, in which atoms are knocked out of the top of a planet’s atmosphere by energetic charged particles.

“The combination of data from these instruments allowed scientists to make a new kind of map of sputtered argon in relation to the solar wind. This map revealed the presence of argon at high altitudes in the exact locations that the energetic particles crashed into the atmosphere and splashed out argon, showing sputtering in real time. The researchers also found that this process is happening at a rate four times higher than previously predicted and that this rate increases during solar storms,” NASA explained in May.

“The direct observation of sputtering confirms that the process was a primary source of atmospheric loss in Mars’ early history when the Sun’s activity was much stronger.”

It has been a successful little orbiter, even capturing an image of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS earlier this year, and operating beyond its initial mission end date of 2022.

“The MAVEN team has a strong record of innovation in addressing engineering challenges to extend the mission and add capability,” MAVEN Project Manager Rich Burns at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center said in a statement as the mission was extended in 2022. “This next extended mission brings new opportunities and challenges, and we are confident the team will once again rise to the occasion, enabling much more fantastic MAVEN science.”

That extension took the spacecraft until September 2025, but after that, MAVEN was still going. Now, it is unclear what is happening with the orbiter after NASA’s ground stations lost contact with it on December 6.

“Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the Red Planet. After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal,” NASA explained in a statement this week.  “The spacecraft and operations teams are investigating the anomaly to address the situation.”

As well as capturing data on the Martian atmosphere, the orbiter is used to relay signals from rovers Curiosity and Perseverance on the planet’s surface. However, there are several other orbiters, like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, that do the same task, so NASA will not be too worried by this aspect. 

Loss of communication is not unheard of with interplanetary and deep space probes, and NASA does have a tendency to find ways to fix the problem and reestablish contact. In 2023, the US space agency lost contact with Voyager 2 before resuming contact just a few days later. Hopefully, NASA will be able to do the same with MAVEN. For now, they say that they will share more information as and when it becomes available.