NASA has lost contact with MAVEN, the Mars orbiter that has studied the planet's upper atmosphere since 2014. Telemetry showed all systems normal before MAVEN passed behind Mars, but the spacecraft failed to respond after reappearing. MAVEN also serves as a high-capacity relay for rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance, so an extended outage could limit high-resolution imagery and complex data returns. Engineers are actively investigating while other orbiters continue to provide relay support.
NASA Loses Contact With MAVEN After a Decade — Orbiter Goes Silent After Routine Mars Pass
NASA loses contact with Maven after Mars pass | ©Image Credit: NASA/Goddard
NASA has lost contact with MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution), the orbiter that has studied Mars' upper atmosphere for more than 10 years. The spacecraft completed a routine orbit and appeared to be healthy before passing behind Mars, but mission teams received no signal when it re-emerged.
Telemetry indicated all subsystems were operating normally before the spacecraft was occulted by the planet, making the sudden silence especially puzzling to engineers working on the mission.
“The spacecraft and operations teams are investigating the anomaly to address the situation. More information will be shared once it becomes available,” NASA said in a statement.
Launched in 2013 and arriving at Mars in 2014, MAVEN's primary objective has been to examine the Red Planet's upper atmosphere and how the solar wind strips gases into space. That research helped strengthen the case that solar-driven processes gradually removed much of Mars' atmosphere, transforming it from a warmer, wetter world into the cold, arid planet we see today.
Relay Role and Mission Impact
Beyond its scientific investigations, MAVEN has provided a high-capacity communications relay for surface missions such as the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, forwarding large volumes of science data and high-resolution images to Earth. That relay capability is an important part of NASA's redundancy across Mars orbiters.
A prolonged outage of MAVEN's relay service could reduce the total amount of high-resolution imagery and complex scientific datasets that surface missions can transmit, but NASA still has other orbiters — notably the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO, arrived 2006) and Mars Odyssey (in operation since 2001) — to help maintain communications while engineers work to recover MAVEN.
What Comes Next
Engineers and spacecraft operations teams are actively investigating the anomaly and attempting to re-establish contact. NASA and the mission's operators at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) will provide updates as new information becomes available.
Why this matters: MAVEN has been a long-running and scientifically valuable mission that both advanced understanding of atmospheric loss on Mars and supported current surface missions. Its unexpected silence is a setback that mission teams are racing to understand and resolve.
