NASA declares its Mars spacecraft MAVEN dead, but its legacy lives on

Since its launch from Cape Canaveral on November 18, 2013, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft spent more than 11 years studying the Martian atmosphere after arriving at the Red Planet in September 2014. Originally designed for a primary mission of just one Earth year, MAVEN greatly exceeded expectations. Unfortunately, communication was unexpectedly lost on December 6, 2025, following a routine orbital pass behind the planet. Following an anomaly review, NASA officially declared the historic mission complete in June 2026.

This image was captured during the launch of MAVEN from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Following the anomaly in December 2025, NASA made several exhaustive attempts to re-establish contact with the silent orbiter. Working alongside the Deep Space Network—a global network of giant radio antennas—mission controllers repeatedly transmitted recovery signals in an effort to restore the telemetry link and check the status of the spacecraft. Despite these efforts, which spanned months, MAVEN remained unresponsive, and NASA was ultimately unable to re-establish communication.

This image is an artist's illustration of the MAVEN spacecraft orbiting Mars.

While NASA's attempts to restore contact ultimately proved unsuccessful, the mission team did recover a brief fragment of tracking data on December 6, 2025, during an ongoing radio science campaign; no spacecraft telemetry had been received since December 4.

Analysis of the faint Doppler signal indicated that MAVEN had entered safe mode and was rotating at an unusually high rate as it emerged from behind Mars, causing its batteries to drain rapidly. The signal's frequency also suggested the spacecraft's orbital trajectory may have slightly altered.

This image was captured during an illumination test conducted on the MAVEN spacecraft inside a clean room at NASA's Kennedy Space Center during its pre-launch assembly.

When NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft completed four years in orbit around Mars, the mission team marked the milestone by releasing a unique "selfie" of the observatory. Over the course of its mission, MAVEN revolutionized our understanding of how the Red Planet's thin upper atmosphere interacts with solar wind.

The image shows a a composite selfie created using MAVEN’s Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS). Because the instrument had limited articulation around its support boom, some parts of the spacecraft could not be directly imaged: the drawn lines indicate the approximate locations of components outside the camera's field of view.

MAVEN's primary objective was to solve a long-standing mystery about Mars: how the Red Planet transitioned from a warm, wet world billions of years ago into the freezing, arid desert we see today.

By measuring the rate at which solar wind strips away isotopic variants of gas, MAVEN proved that "atmospheric sputtering"—the literal knocking of atoms from the top of the atmosphere into space by high-speed solar ions—was the main culprit behind the planet's atmospheric loss over eons.

This image, released by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio on October 14, 2014, artistically depicts interactions between Mars' thin upper atmosphere and solar wind.

Because ultraviolet wavelengths are invisible to the human eye, MAVEN's striking global maps of Mars were rendered in false color. This specific observation was taken in July 2022 during the southern hemisphere's summer, which coincides with the planet's closest approach to the Sun.

The photo shows a false-color ultraviolet image obtained using MAVEN’s IUVS. The deep canyons of Valles Marineris appear at the upper left, filled with tan clouds. The Argyre Basin, one of the deepest craters on Mars, sits at the lower left beneath a pale pink atmospheric haze. The shrinking southern polar ice cap is visible in stark white.

By observing the planet in the ultraviolet spectrum, MAVEN could also track shifts in the Martian atmosphere, mapping invisible "nightglow" gases and observing the growth and retreat of polar ice caps across changing seasons. In these processed views, atmospheric ozone appears purple, while clouds and hazes show up as white or blue.

In this image, Mars displays particularly vivid colors. A prominent magenta region at the top marks ozone that accumulated during the long, cold nights of the northern winter. White clouds are visible over the north polar region. Much of the remaining surface appears green in the enhanced ultraviolet image. At the lower left, the deep canyon system of Valles Marineris can be spotted in tan. Numerous craters can also be seen in the Martian landscape.

Prior to its historic 11-year mission, MAVEN underwent rigorous assembly, testing, and inspection to ensure it could survive both the violent vibrations of launch and the harsh conditions of space.

This image was captured during the final inspection of the MAVEN at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. In the image, a technician can be spotted monitoring the inspection procedures.

MAVEN's scientific payload required a sterile environment before launch to prevent contaminants on Earth from interfering with its atmospheric sensors.

In this image, Lockheed Martin technicians can be spotted lifting the protective barrier from the MAVEN spacecraft inside a clean room at the Kennedy Space Center.

Analyzing data collected during a powerful solar storm in December 2023, scientists discovered an unexpected atmospheric phenomenon that had never before been observed at Mars. Using MAVEN’s instruments, researchers identified evidence of the "Zwan-Wolf effect." While this effect is commonly observed in Earth’s strong magnetosphere, observing it in the Martian atmosphere provided important insights into how space weather interacts with planets lacking a global magnetic field.

This image is an artistic representation of the Zwan-Wolf effect at Mars, as observed by NASA’s MAVEN.

NASA scientists moved closer to understanding the origins of Mars’ mysterious moon, Phobos, after MAVEN conducted a series of high-speed flybys in late 2015. Because MAVEN’s highly elliptical orbit occasionally crossed the path of Phobos, the spacecraft was able to collect ultraviolet spectral data from within 186 miles (300 kilometers) of the Martian satellite, helping researchers determine whether it is a captured asteroid or merged debris from a massive planetary impact.

This image illustrates how the orbit of MAVEN crossed the orbit of Phobos and shows the configuration of the two orbital paths during the flybys of early December 2015.

In a notable success of international scientific cooperation, NASA’s MAVEN also partnered with the United Arab Emirates’ Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) to study dynamic proton auroras on Mars. By combining remote auroral observations collected by EMM with in-situ plasma measurements obtained directly by MAVEN, the joint team discovered a newly identified mechanism that creates highly localized, "patchy" proton auroras across the Martian sky.

This image is an illustration that compares how proton auroras form on Mars. The top panel shows the standard formation process discovered in 2018, while the bottom panel shows the newly identified mechanism that creates patchy proton auroras.