What happens to a space agency if a spacecraft goes behind a planet and won’t come back out? After a months-long effort to recover contact between Earth and MAVEN, NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN orbiter, the question now has become, “Is it forever lost?” It had been serving much longer than its nominal mission, making one of the largest science archives ever of Mars’ evolution of its atmosphere, and with it conditions which permitted liquid water to exist.
The last time the mission had trouble communicating with Earth, it was cause by a simple geometric alignment Mars setting behind MAVEN. Across deep space, that is the simple fact: lunar crews on Artemis missions are not expected to worry about, say, temporary blackouts that occur when the terrain blocks the transmission. However, there are much more significant distances, harder power timing and worse response on Mars. NASA’s Deep Space Communications overview states that “Mars communications can introduce a delay of 4-24 minutes, complicating the task of fault diagnosis for any fast-moving spacecraft to attempt correction. With MAVEN, telemetry confirmed that the probe had entered safe mode, and has then started tumbling into a configuration that can prevent solar arrays from maintaining the proper orientation for lengthy periods of time to keep the probe powered and stable.
This operational loss is significant because this wasn’t just another overstuffed old orbiter. It was the first mission dedicated to the study of the upper atmosphere of Mars and for that reason played a specific role within the general study of the planet by imaging and mapping.It was not a general imaging or mapping mission, but was dedicated to the study of the upper atmosphere of the planet, as described by NASA. They helped solar-wind scientists determine the escape rate of gases to space as time went on by monitoring the interaction of the solar wind with the upper reaches of planet’s atmosphere. Now those studies connected present-day measurements with an earlier planet wide change from a thicker atmosphere to the cold, dry Mars as day-to-day reality.
In fact, the scientific value of the mission was apparent and then came more. MAVEN data revealed new clues in the loss process within months of being brought up to Mars in 2014, such as how solar wind particles penetrate deeply into the atmosphere. The spacecraft over the next ten years collected seasonal variability data, solar data, and data on escape of the ionosphere. According to NASA’s own mission summary, through MAVEN, researchers were able to arrive at estimates of losses over time, by quantifying the current escape rate and identifying the processes responsible for causing the loss. That kind of data is more useful with time because there’s no such thing as a dramatic snapshot of the atmospheric behaviour, it is built over time by: repetition, comparison, persistence.
Along with its prominent charge is a less shouted one: Relay communications support to surface missions on Mars was a key job handled by the MWW as part of the MAVEN mission. Orbiters are not only used to study planets, they also contribute to the delivery of data home. Many missions rely on relay communications, not direct transmission, and one example is mars rovers, says NASA. NASA’s active Mars-orbiting mix of spacecraft has grown older and older without MAVEN and broader successes of the constellation are less easy to bypass: With each loss, scientific and operational possibilities for NASA’s missions become more constrained. MAVEN’s mission is not done after the silent moment, however. The observations continue to be stored, and will continue to help with future studies of Mars’ climate history, atmospheric escape and habitability long after the spacecraft has gone silent.