It’s the end of an era. NASA confirmed on June 4 that its MAVEN spacecraft orbiting Mars is dead and the mission is officially over. The solar-powered orbiter, which went silent six months ago, was last known tumbling uncontrollably in the Martian orbit and was losing power gradually.
MAVEN, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, was launched in November 2013 and it has been collecting invaluable data on the red planet’s atmosphere since September 21, 2014 when it entered the Martian orbit. MAVEN was also a key platform for relaying data collected by Perseverance and Curiosity rovers to Earth.
NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft launched in 2013 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida to observe the Martian atmosphere and its evolution.
Now that mission has come to an end.
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In a release, NASA said that it convened an anomaly review board in February to evaluate recovery efforts and the board concluded that MAVEN is not recoverable.
The spacecraft was last heard from by NASA’s Deep Space Network on December 6, 2025 before it went behind Mars. Telemetry showed all its subsystems were working normally, NASA said. The team came to know about MAVEN’s uncontrollable spin and the fact that it had slipped into ‘safe mode’ through a brief telemetry data.
“The review board concluded that due to this rotation, the batteries on the spacecraft had drained, causing the communications system to lose power and rendering MAVEN in an unrecoverable state,” NASA said.
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What did NASA’s MAVEN orbiter achieve?
The MAVEN orbiter has made incredible contributions to understanding the climate and atmospheric chemistry of Mars. For one, it discovered that the erosion of the planet’s atmosphere increases significantly during solar storms. According to NASA, it was the only spacecraft that could simultaneously take measurements of both the Sun and the Martian atmospheric response.
MAVEN also discovered several types of auroras on Mars that are created by protons. It helped confirm that while proton auroras only occur in very small regions near Earth’s poles, they can occur everywhere on Mars.
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Another significant finding was atmospheric sputtering. It is a process where ions crash into the Martian atmosphere at high enough speeds that they splash gas molecules out of the atmosphere. Using data collected by the orbiter, scientists were able to confirm that there’s sputtered argon at high altitudes on Mars in the exact locations that the energetic particles crashed into the atmosphere.
MAVEN also found that the heat generated from dust storm loft water molecules into the upper atmosphere and this leads to a sudden surge in loss of water into outer space. The orbiters biggest recent assignment was photographing the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS between September and October 2025.
Since MAVEN’s mission began, its science team has produced more than 800 publications with more planned.
“The data collected from MAVEN will continue to provide valuable insight into Mars for decades to come,” said Louise Prockter, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA.
