NASA’s 11-Year Mars Probe Lost After Tumbling Out Of Control
Trouble began on December 6 last year, during a standard 20-30 minute orbit pass behind the Red Planet. Up until that point, all systems on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft were operating five by five. However, the probe never emerged from its scheduled comms blackout; all NASA got was complete silence.
For months since, engineers sent blind commands to reset the flight computer and coax the spacecraft into "phoning home." In February, NASA convened an anomaly review board to investigate the silence. Experts re-examined open-loop radio recordings captured right as MAVEN emerged from behind Mars. They discovered a fatal clue: the orbiter was spinning out of control at 2.7 revolutions per minute.
This rapid rotation sealed its fate, because MAVEN needs to stay stable to keep its high-gain antenna locked onto Earth and its solar panels fixed on the sun. With the solar arrays not able to generate electricity, the spacecraft's batteries quickly drained, then cut all power to its communication systems. NASA officially declared the spacecraft unrecoverable, though a final report on what triggered the sudden spin is expected later this year.
MAVEN’s data revealed exactly how Mars transformed from a warm, wet, potentially habitable world into a frozen desert. Its instruments tracked how solar storms strip away the atmosphere and provided the first-ever observation of "atmospheric sputtering," a process where charged particles strike the upper atmosphere and splash gas molecules into space like a cannonball hitting a pool. MAVEN also tracked how global dust storms loft water molecules high into the air, accelerating water loss, and it even mapped unique proton auroras that glow across the entire planet.
Beyond its own science, which produced over 800 publications, MAVEN was a vital communication bridge for humanity's surface explorers, relaying data from the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers back to Earth. It even secured a solar system record for the most data relayed from another planet in a single day.
The silent spacecraft is expected to continue to drift in its current orbit around Mars for the next 50 to 100 years.
Main image credit: Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Colorado/Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics
