NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft ends 11-year Mars mission quietly
▼ Summary
– NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft lost communication after a routine occultation behind Mars on December 6, and ground teams failed to reestablish contact.
– NASA has officially ended efforts to recover MAVEN and is beginning decommissioning procedures.
– MAVEN launched in 2013, arrived at Mars in 2014, and successfully studied the Martian atmosphere and solar wind for 11 years, far exceeding its original mission.
– Investigators recovered fragments of telemetry and Doppler shift data from signals recorded after the loss of signal, but the exact cause of the failure may never be determined.
– The recovered data came from a separate science campaign monitoring radio signal distortion through the upper Martian atmosphere, not from real-time ground observations.
NASA’s long-running MAVEN spacecraft has gone silent, bringing an unexpected end to an 11-year mission that far exceeded expectations. The orbiter was in excellent condition when it passed behind Mars on December 6 of last year during a routine event known as an occultation. The passage was expected to last less than an hour, but ground teams never reestablished contact when the spacecraft should have emerged.
That loss of signal triggered immediate contingency efforts. Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory spent weeks listening for faint transmissions and uplinking commands blindly to the probe, which orbits Mars more than 200 million miles from Earth. Despite those efforts, no reliable link was restored. On Wednesday, NASA officials confirmed they are giving up the search.
“NASA has ceased efforts to search for the MAVEN spacecraft and are beginning activities to decommission the mission,” said Mike Moreau, MAVEN’s project manager at Goddard.
The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft launched from Earth in 2013 and reached Mars orbit in 2014. Its primary goal was to study how the solar wind strips away the Martian atmosphere. The mission was an unqualified success, operating for 11 years at Mars and far outliving its original prime mission. Many NASA planetary exploration missions run for decades, which made the sudden failure all the more surprising.
Investigators may never pinpoint exactly what went wrong. They are combing through data transmitted just before the signal was blocked by Mars and have recovered fragments of telemetry after the spacecraft reemerged from behind the planet.
“As part of this investigation, the team members at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were successful in recovering some fragments of telemetry and Doppler shift data from the spacecraft,” Moreau said. “These data were extracted from recorded signals that were recovered during the hours following the loss of signal.”
Ground controllers did not detect those faint signals in real time. They were captured as part of a separate science campaign designed to measure the density and dynamics of the upper Martian atmosphere, which can distort radio signals passing through it. That serendipitous recording may now provide the only clues to what silenced one of NASA’s most productive Mars explorers.
(Source: Ars Technica)
