NASA Loses Contact with MAVEN Mars Orbiter, Begins Decommissioning After Battery-Draining Anomaly

NASA announced Wednesday that its MAVEN spacecraft is unrecoverable after an anomaly review board determined the orbiter can no longer perform its science and data-relay mission. The spacecraft was last heard from on December 6 when it passed behind Mars and failed to regain contact. Telemetry recorded before the loss of signal showed all subsystems operating normally.

After the spacecraft emerged, NASA’s Deep Space Network detected no signal. A brief fragment of telemetry indicated the spacecraft had entered safe mode and was rotating at an unusually high rate. The anomaly review board, which convened in February, concluded that the rotation drained the batteries, causing the communications system to lose power.

The probable root cause of the anomaly remains under investigation. A final report from the review board is expected later this year. NASA has begun the official process of decommissioning the mission and archiving its full dataset.

MAVEN was launched in November 2013. It spent its primary one-year mission and more than a decade beyond studying Mars’ upper atmosphere, ionosphere and interactions with the Sun. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission was the first devoted entirely to observing the Martian atmosphere and its evolution.

MAVEN determined that solar storms accelerate atmospheric erosion, discovered new types of auroras at Mars and became the first spacecraft to directly measure atmospheric sputtering at any planet. In 2018 the mission tracked how a planet-wide dust storm lofted water molecules higher into the atmosphere, causing a surge in water lost to space.

The MAVEN science team produced more than 800 publications during the mission’s lifetime.

“The science MAVEN has given us is key to informing what kind of radiation protection and safety measures we must take before sending humans to Mars,” said Louise Prockter, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. ” “The MAVEN mission has truly advanced our understanding of the Martian atmosphere and evolution.

This dataset has had a tremendous impact on the field,” said Shannon Curry, MAVEN’s principal investigator and a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.