NASA has announced the end of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter mission, or MAVEN. The decision came almost half a year after scientists last received a signal from the spacecraft.
According to the agency, all MAVEN systems were operating normally before the spacecraft passed behind Mars in December. After it emerged from behind the planet, NASA’s Deep Space Network was unable to detect a signal. Preliminary findings indicate that the spacecraft was in safe mode and that its batteries were likely depleted after it entered a rapid spin. NASA said this left MAVEN in an unrecoverable state.
NASA has begun the process of decommissioning the mission. A special review board is expected to publish its final report on the cause of the spacecraft’s loss later this year.
The preliminary findings have not yet identified a possible root cause of the anomaly. The investigation is continuing. At the same time, NASA has begun the standard process of archiving the mission’s full data set so that it remains available to the scientific and research community.
MAVEN was launched in November 2013 to study the upper layers of Mars’s atmosphere and how much of that atmosphere had been lost to space. The mission helped NASA better understand how atmospheric loss can affect a planet’s climate, the presence of liquid water and its potential habitability.
The spacecraft directly observed a rare process of atmospheric escape known as sputtering. In it, high-speed ions collide with the Martian atmosphere, knocking gas molecules beyond it. Those data helped scientists understand how Mars lost much of its atmosphere.
MAVEN also broadened understanding of how the Sun affects Mars, why auroras on the planet can be seen not only near the poles, as on Earth, but across its surface, and how dust clouds form on Mars at such scale that, in 2018, one of them enveloped the entire planet.
MAVEN was one of several NASA missions whose scientific work could have been halted because of budget cuts proposed by President Trump last year. Under that scenario, the spacecraft would have continued orbiting Mars but would no longer have transmitted scientific data and, over time, if its orbit degraded, could have fallen onto the planet’s surface, Bruce Jakosky, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado and the mission’s emeritus principal investigator, told The Washington Post.