The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that its first exploration mission dedicated to observing the Martian atmosphere and its evolution - the "Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution" (MAVEN) - has officially ended after a major mission period of more than 11 years orbiting Mars, far exceeding the initial one-year period. On December 6, 2025, the probe experienced signal anomalies after flying behind Mars and eventually lost contact. NASA recently confirmed that the spacecraft was unable to recover and no longer had scientific observation and data relay capabilities.
NASA will hold a media conference call on June 3 (Wednesday) at 2 p.m. Eastern Time to introduce the main scientific results and follow-up arrangements of the MAVEN mission. In February this year, NASA established an abnormal situation review committee to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the cause of the loss of contact, the rescue process, and the current status of the spacecraft. The committee determined that MAVEN was unable to be put back into service. This conclusion was consistent with the mission team's previous analysis.
According to the telemetry data returned by MAVEN before it flew behind Mars in December last year, all subsystems of the spacecraft were operating normally at that time. However, when it flew out from behind Mars, NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) failed to detect normal signals and only captured a very short telemetry fragment in the radio signal recorded by the open loop receiver. Analysis showed that MAVEN was in safe mode when it reappeared in view and was rotating at an unusually high angular velocity, indicating a significant disturbance in its orbital attitude control.
The review committee judged that it was this high-rotation state that caused the spacecraft's battery to quickly drain, causing the communication system to lose power support, and MAVEN eventually fell into an unrecoverable state. This preliminary conclusion does not yet provide the root cause of the anomaly. The relevant investigation is still continuing, and the committee is expected to submit a final report later this year. NASA has initiated the MAVEN mission decommissioning process in accordance with standard procedures, including archiving the complete scientific data set to support future scientific research and deep space exploration planning.
Louis Proctor, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters, said that the scientific results provided by MAVEN are critical for planning future manned missions to Mars, because these data help engineers determine what radiation protection and safety measures need to be taken during human missions. She pointed out that even after the mission ends, the observational data accumulated by MAVEN will continue to provide key reference for the study of the Martian environment and evolution in the coming decades.
MAVEN was launched in November 2013 and subsequently entered Mars orbit. Its scientific mission focuses on the upper atmosphere of Mars, the ionosphere, and the interaction with the sun and solar wind. The core goal is to study the process of the Martian atmosphere escaping into space. Through long-term observations of the atmospheric loss mechanism, scientists can deduce the evolutionary history of Mars' atmosphere and climate, as well as the changes in liquid water and planetary habitability during geological history.
Shannon Currie, principal investigator of MAVEN and of the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, said that the mission has significantly advanced human understanding of the Martian atmosphere and its evolution, and this huge data set has had a profound impact on related research fields. She emphasized that the MAVEN science team is proud of the series of discoveries made by the mission.
In terms of scientific achievements, one of MAVEN's early important discoveries is that during periods of increased solar wind and solar storm activity, the erosion rate of the Martian atmosphere increases significantly. Through long-term monitoring, scientists have revealed how solar winds and solar storms continue to "stripping" the Martian atmosphere and played a key role in transforming Mars from a potentially habitable world into the cold and arid planet it is today. Because MAVEN can simultaneously measure the space environment from the direction of the sun and the response of the Martian atmosphere to it, it plays a unique role in studying the space weather relationship between the sun and Mars.
MAVEN has also discovered a variety of aurora phenomena that appear in the Martian sky. These "light and shadow shows" appear when high-energy particles rush into the atmosphere, bombard the gas and stimulate it to glow. Research shows that protons on Mars will produce a different type of aurora than in the past: Unlike proton auroras on Earth, which are rare and limited to near-polar regions, such auroras on Mars can appear globally.
To understand how Mars lost much of its atmosphere, MAVEN directly measured the so-called "atmospheric sputtering" phenomenon for the first time on any planet in the solar system. The mission team tracked this process by observing the spatial distribution of the noble gas argon. Argon hardly reacts chemically with other components in the Martian atmosphere. The main way it is removed is atmospheric sputtering, that is, high-energy ions hit the atmosphere at a high enough speed to "splash" the gas molecules out of the atmosphere, similar to the splash caused by someone jumping into a swimming pool with force. With the help of 11 years of observation data, scientists identified sputtered argon corresponding to the incident area of high-energy particles in the high altitude, and were able to capture the atmospheric sputtering process in a near "real-time" sense.
During the exploration mission, MAVEN also participated in the study of "global" dust storms on Mars. In 2018, a series of dust storms evolved into giant dust clouds that covered the entire planet. The MAVEN team took the opportunity to analyze the impact of this event on Mars' upper atmosphere to assess its role in the escape of water into space. The results confirmed that heating caused by dust storms can lift water molecules to much higher altitudes than normal, causing a dramatic increase in the amount of water lost to space in a short period of time.
In addition to Mars science, MAVEN also contributes to NASA's observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS from Mars orbit. Last year, during a new 10-day observing program, MAVEN photographed the comet at multiple wavelengths, like taking multiple photos with different filters, and acquired high-resolution ultraviolet images to identify the hydrogen atoms released by the comet. By combining these observations, scientists are able to identify multiple molecular components and gain a better understanding of the comet's chemical makeup and evolutionary history.
During the mission, the MAVEN science team has published more than 800 academic papers, and future research results based on the mission data will continue to be published. In addition, in terms of communication support, MAVEN is an important part of NASA's Mars data relay network. It has long provided relay services for data transmitted back to Earth by the Mars rover, and set a record in the solar system for the total amount of data transmitted back from other planets in a single day.
According to NASA, the audio of today's media call was broadcast live online through the agency's website. Participants included Tiffany Morgan, Mars Exploration Program Director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, MAVEN Project Manager Mike Morrow, NASA Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Capability Development Deputy Project Manager Greg Heckler, and MAVEN Principal Investigator Shannon Curry. Media who wish to ask questions by phone must make an appointment via email before 12 noon on the same day. The relevant media registration policy details have been publicly released.
MAVEN is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program portfolio. The Atmospheric and Space Physics Laboratory of the University of Colorado Boulder, where the mission's principal investigator is located, is responsible for the mission's scientific operations, publicity and science popularization. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is responsible for mission management, Lockheed Martin Space Systems is responsible for spacecraft development and operational control, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory provides navigation and deep space network support.