US EditionNASA Loses Contact with Its Maven Spacecraft Orbiting Mars for the Past Decade
- On Dec. 6 NASA's Deep Space Network lost communications with MAVEN during a routine occultation, and a Dec. 9 update said the spacecraft went silent three days earlier despite nominal telemetry before.
- MAVEN has operated well beyond its original prime mission, overcoming prior inertial measurement units issues by adopting an all‑stellar navigation approach.
- MAVEN's high, 2,800-mile orbit lets it relay science data for up to 30 minutes per pass and supports higher rover throughput via its UHF antenna.
- NASA teams are working to restore contact and diagnose the anomaly, as a prolonged MAVEN outage could reduce rover data throughput and Mars Odyssey will soon run out of fuel, tightening relay capacity.
- NASA's budget proposal zeroed out funding for MAVEN, which cost $22.6 million to operate in 2024, though MAVEN has enough propellant to maintain orbit through at least the end of the decade.
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55 Articles
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced today that it has lost signal from its Mars-orbiting Maven spacecraft, which was supposed to send data to Earth on December 6, but did not.
Associated Press News
NASA loses contact with its Maven spacecraft orbiting Mars for the past decade
NASA has lost contact with a spacecraft that's been orbiting Mars for more than a decade. Maven abruptly stopped communicating to ground stations over the weekend.
A NASA Spacecraft Orbiting Mars Just Mysteriously Went Offline
There are currently seven spacecraft orbiting Mars, three of which belong to NASA. They’re designed to study the hostile planet’s geology, atmosphere, and radiation, while also supporting missions on the surface from just over 100 to tens of thousands of miles away. But keeping up with spacecraft across a vast distance of tens of millions of miles is no easy feat. Case in point: in a Tuesday update, NASA admitted that it had lost signal of its M…
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