NASA investigates what killed its Mars orbiter Maven as agency says goodbye

As usual, a healthy NASA orbiter disappeared behind Mars in December. When the spacecraft came back on the other side, it was never the same again.

The US space agency announced on June 3 that the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, aka MAVEN, has ended, after a review board determined that the orbiter, which has orbited Mars for more than 11 years, is now out of reach.

Although all of Maven’s systems were normal before turning around on December 6, 2025, something mysterious happened to the spacecraft as it disappeared from view. A piece of data transmitted to Earth indicates that Maven began to fall rapidly. While mission control typically lost contact with the spacecraft for only 20 to 30 minutes when it passed behind Mars, the team never got its signal back.

NASA’s anomaly review board, convened in February, determined this irregular rotation, combined with declining battery power, meant there was no viable way to recover Maven. In a teleconference Wednesday, officials offered some praise for the mission, which has lasted 10 years longer than the team originally planned.

“I think the team here has really experienced the loss of a loved one with the end of the mission,” said Mike Morrow, project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

Maven’s decommissioning closes a chapter in Mars exploration: NASA has lost a key activist who rewrote scientists’ understanding of the Martian atmosphere and quietly brought vast amounts of data home to rovers on the ground.

It is not yet known whether a meteor is responsible for Maven’s death. NASA has not yet completed its investigation into the root cause of the incident. The agency is expected to submit a final report later this year.

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Arriving at Mars in September 2014, MAVEN has focused on “atmospheric escape” – the leakage of gas from the top of Mars’ atmosphere into space. Its measurements showed that it increases during solar storms, when energy and particles are blasted from the Sun. A major space-weather event in May 2024, one of the strongest seen at Mars in 20 years, triggered a torrent of particles that stripped gas and illuminated the planet with glowing auroras.

“We now have a better understanding of atmospheric escape on Mars than on any other planet, including Earth,” said Shannon Curry, MAVEN principal investigator, of the University of Colorado Boulder.

MAVEN found a variety of auroras on Mars and helped the Perseverance rover capture the first visible light auroras from the surface, giving scientists a better idea of ​​what astronauts can see with their eyes. The orbiter also showed how the dust storm that swept across the planet in 2018 drove the loss of water to space, tying together the fate of dust, climate and Mars’ ancient oceans.

One of the most important results of Maven involved a process called “sputtering”. Simply put, charged particles collide in the upper atmosphere and knock neutral atoms into space, like a cannonball spraying water from a pond. This process may have stripped Mars of its atmosphere for billions of years, which would have impacts on other planets as well.

The mission also made some surprising discoveries. MAVEN’s particle detector picked up hard X-rays from a distant black hole system called Scorpius X‑1, and the team used that strange signal to learn more about the density of Mars’ upper atmosphere.

Beyond the science, Maven played an important role behind the scenes as a communications relay. Spacecraft passed data between Earth and surface missions such as Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and Perseverance. Although it handled only about 8 percent of all relay sessions, it delivered about 18 percent of the total data, according to NASA, thanks to a new coding scheme that increased how much information it could send during each contact. At one point, Maven set a Solar System record for most data returned in a single relay session.

For now, Maven will remain in a wide orbit around Mars. NASA expects the dead spacecraft to remain in space for 50 to 100 years before the orbit naturally shrinks and falls into the Martian atmosphere. Officials say that this poses no threat to other orbiters circling the Red Planet.

To compensate for Maven’s lost relay capability, Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and European orbiters have adjusted their operations. To provide more robust communications and navigation services for future robotic and human missions, NASA also plans a new Mars telecommunications network in the 2030s with the help of commercial partners.

However, for the people who worked on Maven the loss feels personal. Curry said the team was “torn” about it. When asked what she would write on the orbiter’s tombstone, she did not hesitate in her answer:

“The best Mars mission ever.”