NASA declares end to MAVEN Mars mission
NASA has formally ended a Mars mission that has been out of contact for six months while the investigation into the spacecraft's demise continues.
NASA announced June 3 the end of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, mission when a review board concluded that the Mars orbiter was in an unrecoverable state after suffering some kind of anomaly in December.
Controllers last heard from MAVEN on Dec. 6, which was working normally as it passed behind Mars as seen from Earth. When it emerged 20 to 30 minutes later, NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) failed to detect transmissions from the spacecraft.
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Efforts to restore contact in the weeks that followed were unsuccessful, said Mike Moreau, MAVEN project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, during a June 3 media call. That included using the DSN as well as the 100-meter radio telescope at Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.
"Unfortunately, all of these efforts to reestablish communication with MAVEN were ultimately unsuccessful, and no telemetry or signal has been received from the spacecraft since Dec. 6," he said.
Investigators, though, were able to recover a bit of telemetry from the spacecraft hours after the loss of contact as part of a radio science experiment to study the Martian atmosphere. "That data has been very helpful to the anomaly review team to try to provide at least some information about what happened," he said.
Based on that data, investigators concluded that the spacecraft was rotating at an "unexpected rate" of 2.7 revolutions per minute, he said. The spacecraft, in normal operations, is inertially stabilized and not intended to rotate. That rotation deprived the spacecraft of solar power and drained its batteries over several hours, "rendering the spacecraft in an unrecoverable state."
The investigation has yet to determine a root cause for the failure, and Moreau declined to discuss what leading potential causes are being studied. A final report by the review team is expected in a couple of months.
MAVEN launched in November 2013, entering orbit around Mars in September 2014. The spacecraft was designed to study the planet's upper atmosphere and how it interacted with the solar wind, including how the atmosphere escapes into space.
"We now have a better understanding of atmospheric escape at Mars than at any other planet, including Earth," said Shannon Curry, principal investigator for MAVEN at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.
MAVEN conducted other science as well, from the serendipitous detection of X-rays from a black hole binary system 9,000 light-years away to observations of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS months before the spacecraft was lost. "MAVEN science has had incredible implications for not just atmospheric evolution at Mars, but planetary science, heliophysics and even astrophysics," she said.
The spacecraft also served as a communications relay between spacecraft on the surface and the DSN, along with other NASA and European Space Agency Mars orbiters collectively known as the Mars Relay Network. MAVEN played an outsized role in that effort, conducting 8% of the network's relay sessions but handling 18% of the data returned, said Tiffany Morgan, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program.
Four other spacecraft - NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and ESA's Mars Express and Trace Gas Orbiter - continue to serve as relays. "There's been some small adjustments to rover operations," said Greg Heckler, deputy program manager for capability development in NASA's Space Communications and Navigation program, but no "science deficit."
"There is a slight delay on occasion because we don't have as many assets in view to getting our science data back," Morgan said. "MAVEN was critical in returning science data versus operational data, but the Mars Relay Network is resilient enough at this point in time to accommodate, for the most part, the loss of MAVEN."
The loss of MAVEN underscores the importance, officials said, of the Mars Telecommunications Network (MTN) mission. Last year's budget reconciliation package included $700 million to fund a mission to handle communications for current and future Mars missions, with a requirement that it be launched by the end of 2028.
There is an "urgency" in getting MTN in service, Heckler said. "NASA establishing this infrastructure is going to be very important to continue science operations of the current missions there today, and then, of course, enable us to execute on these newer, bigger missions yet to come."
NASA released the final request for proposals for MTN in May, with proposals due to the agency June 15. The agency said when it released the RFP that it expects to have the winning company under contract by Oct. 1.
MAVEN is currently in an orbit between about 200 and 4,000 kilometers in altitude. Moreau said the spacecraft should remain in orbit for 50 to 100 years before reentering. As part of mission closeout activities, he said the project will do a "long-term propagation" of the spacecraft's trajectory so other missions can avoid any potential close approaches.
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