After waiting out a planned two-week communication blackout, NASA is set to listen again for a Mars orbiter that abruptly went silent more than a month ago.
The renewed contact attempt for the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, or MAVEN, comes after the end of a solar conjunction today (Jan. 16) — a period when the sun sits between Earth and Mars and charged solar particles can interfere with or corrupt radio signals. Communications with spacecraft are typically suspended during these events to avoid sending partial or distorted commands that could trigger unintended, potentially dangerous behavior.
NASA lost contact with MAVEN on Dec. 6, after the spacecraft passed behind Mars — a routine maneuver during which the planet temporarily and predictably blocks communications with Earth. When MAVEN emerged again, however, the agency’s Deep Space Network was unable to reconnect with it.
Telemetry received before the blackout showed all systems operating normally, NASA said in a Dec. 9 statement. However, analysis of a fragment of tracking data recovered from Dec. 6 suggested MAVEN “was rotating in an unexpected manner when it emerged from behind Mars” and was no longer in its planned orbit, NASA said in a Dec. 15 update.
MAVEN has remained silent since Dec. 6 despite repeated attempts to contact it, according to NASA. As part of the recovery effort, the Curiosity rover attempted twice to image MAVEN when it was expected to pass overhead, “but MAVEN was not detected,” the agency said in its most recent update, issued Dec. 23.
Due to the solar conjunction, NASA paused communications with all Mars missions on Dec. 29 and planned to restart them on Jan. 16.
“We will start looking again, but at this point it’s looking very unlikely that we are going to be able to recover the spacecraft,” Louise Prockter, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said Jan. 13 during a meeting of the Small Bodies Assessment Group in Maryland, SpaceNews reported.
Launched in November 2013, MAVEN entered orbit around Mars in September 2014 to study the planet’s upper atmosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. Originally designed to operate for just one year, MAVEN celebrated its 10th anniversary in September 2024. The mission has helped scientists understand how Mars lost its once-thick atmosphere, and has also collected extensive data on Martian dust storms, winds and auroras.
Beyond science, MAVEN plays a critical operational role as a communications relay, transmitting data between Earth and surface missions such as NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. While other orbiters — NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and Mars Express — can also provide relay support, MAVEN carries a significant share of the communications workload.
With MAVEN offline, NASA said it has adjusted rover operations to rely more heavily on the remaining orbiters, scheduling additional passes to support surface activities and modifying daily plans for Curiosity and Perseverance to continue science operations.
MAVEN’s silence is particularly concerning given its history of technical challenges. In 2022, the spacecraft spent about three months in safe mode after problems with its onboard inertial measurement units, or IMUs, which determine its orientation in space.
Following earlier issues with its primary IMU, the mission switched to a backup unit that experienced accelerated wear, leaving MAVEN unable to fully rely on either system. To reduce dependence on aging hardware, the mission team accelerated development of an “all-stellar” navigation mode, which allows MAVEN to orient itself by tracking stars. While less precise than IMU-based navigation, the system is sufficient for routine operations, though not for delicate maneuvers.
The three-month outage and an extended recovery period in 2022 also forced MAVEN to miss observations of several powerful solar flares and temporarily limited its role as a communications relay, reducing science output both from MAVEN and from Mars missions overall.
Despite its age, MAVEN has enough fuel to remain in orbit until at least 2030, and the mission was formally extended in 2022 through September 2025.
If efforts to contact MAVEN continue to come up empty, it would deal another blow to the Mars science community, which is already contending with the potential cancellation of the flagship Mars Sample Return program — a long-delayed mission designed to return Martian rocks collected by the Perseverance rover and return them to Earth, with MAVEN intended to serve as a crucial communications relay.