Houston, we have a problem: NASA has lost contact with the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft.
The aerospace agency revealed the issue in a Tuesday post that explained recent telemetry from the craft suggested all its systems were working as intended.
After NASA received that data, MAVEN swung behind Mars, and therefore lost contact with Earth as its radios can’t send data through a planet.
But when MAVEN’s orbit brought it back into view, ground stations on Earth could not detect any signal from the probe.
NASA doesn’t know what’s gone wrong.
“The spacecraft and operations teams are investigating the anomaly to address the situation,” its statement reads, bef…
Houston, we have a problem: NASA has lost contact with the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft.
The aerospace agency revealed the issue in a Tuesday post that explained recent telemetry from the craft suggested all its systems were working as intended.
After NASA received that data, MAVEN swung behind Mars, and therefore lost contact with Earth as its radios can’t send data through a planet.
But when MAVEN’s orbit brought it back into view, ground stations on Earth could not detect any signal from the probe.
NASA doesn’t know what’s gone wrong.
“The spacecraft and operations teams are investigating the anomaly to address the situation,” its statement reads, before promising to deliver more information once it becomes available.
- You wait for an aurora on Mars and MAVEN spots two arriving at the same time
- Solar wind gave Mars a breather and its magnetosphere inflated
- Self-imposed climate change may have killed Martian life
- NASA’s MAVEN enters Mars orbit to sniff its gas
NASA launched MAVEN in November 2013, and it reached Mars orbit in September 2014 for a planned one-year mission investigating Mars’s atmosphere and serving as a radio relay for rovers on the Martian surface.
The craft survived its first mission and has kept operating since arriving at Mars, but has had some strife along the way.
In 2015, NASA realised MAVEN would come dangerously close to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and ordered adoption of a new traffic management system around the Red Planet.
Two years later, MAVEN came dangerously close to Phobos, one of the two moons orbiting Mars. NASA fired MAVEN’s engines to ensure a collision did not occur.
In 2022, NASA lost contact with MAVEN after it rebooted a navigational instrument. Mission boffins placed the probe in Safe Mode while they figured out how to fix it, and later declared the fix they found meant MAVEN was fit to keep operating for another decade.
Diagnosing and fixing MAVEN won’t be easy because NASA’s connection to the craft can sometimes crawl at just ten bits per second. ®