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NASA has officially declared its MAVEN spacecraft dead, ending a decade-long mission to study the atmosphere of Mars. The space agency confirmed the end of the mission on Wednesday following six months of radio silence. Launched in 2013, the orbiter went silent in early December after passing behind the red planet, with telemetry indicating that a rapid spin destabilized its orbit and completely drained its onboard batteries.
A review board convened by NASA earlier this year concluded that the spacecraft is useless and unable to be recovered. An investigation continues into what caused the problem.
Besides studying Martian weather and observing a stray interstellar comet last year, Maven helped relay information from NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on the surface.
Maven’s lead scientist, Shannon Curry of the University of Colorado Boulder, said the spacecraft made a number of “amazing discoveries.”
Maven “has truly advanced our understanding of the Martian atmosphere and evolution,” she said in a statement.
A brief fragment of telemetry data from analysis of radio signals recorded by the DSN’s open-loop receivers indicated the spacecraft was in safe mode and rotating at an unusually high rate when it emerged from behind Mars, indicating a disruption in MAVEN’s orbit trajectory.
The review board concluded that due to this rotation, the batteries on the spacecraft had drained, causing the communications system to lose power and rendering MAVEN in an unrecoverable state.
These preliminary findings do not address a potential root cause for the anomaly, which still is being investigated. The review board is expected to provide its final report later this year.
NASA has begun the official process of decommissioning the MAVEN mission, following standard procedures to archive the full mission dataset for the science and exploration communities.
