NASA has lost contact with one its three spacecraft orbiting Mars, the agency announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, a second Mars orbiter is perilously close to running out of fuel, and the third mission is running well past its warranty.
Ground teams last heard from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft on Saturday, December 6. “Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the red planet,” NASA said in a short statement. “After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.”
NASA said mission controllers are “investigating the anomaly to address the situation. More information will be shared once it becomes available.”
A long life at Mars
MAVEN is the newest of NASA’s three operational Mars orbiters. The robotic mission arrived at the red planet in September 2014 after a 10-month cruise from Earth, then settled into an elliptical orbit to begin studying interactions between the Sun and the Martian atmosphere.
Earlier in its mission, MAVEN discovered how the solar wind erodes the Martian atmosphere. Over billions of years, the erosion transformed Mars from a warm, wet, habitable world into the cold, inhospitable planet seen today. MAVEN’s science instruments measured the densities of light and heavy isotopes of argon to show how a process known as “sputtering” removed the majority of the air and water from the atmosphere. The spacecraft also made detailed in-situ plasma observations to help scientists understand Mars’ auroras.
Built by Lockheed Martin, MAVEN has far outlived its original design life. More recently, MAVEN became an important node in NASA’s Mars relay network, passing signals between rovers on the Martian surface and controllers on Earth. If NASA is unable to revive the MAVEN spacecraft, the agency has two other orbiters that can pick up the slack.