{"id":180860,"date":"2025-12-12T13:12:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T13:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/180860\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T13:12:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T13:12:08","slug":"nasa-may-have-lost-the-maven-mars-orbiter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/180860\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA May Have Lost The MAVEN Mars Orbiter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When the orbit of NASA\u2019s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft took it behind the Red Planet on December 6th, ground controllers expected a temporary loss of signal (LoS). Unfortunately, the Deep Space Network <a href=\"https:\/\/science.nasa.gov\/blogs\/maven\/2025\/12\/09\/nasa-teams-work-maven-spacecraft-signal-loss\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">hasn\u2019t heard from the science orbiter since<\/a>. Engineers are currently trying to troubleshoot this issue, but without a sign of life from the stricken spacecraft, there are precious few options.<\/p>\n<p>As noted by [Stephen Clark] over at\u00a0ArsTechnica this <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/space\/2025\/12\/nasa-just-lost-contact-with-a-mars-orbiter-and-will-soon-lose-another-one\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">is a pretty big deal<\/a>. Even though MAVEN was launched in November of 2013, it\u2019s a spring chicken compared to the other Mars orbiters. The two other US orbiters: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey, are significantly older by around a decade. Of the two ESA orbiters, Mars Express and ExoMars, the latter is fairly new (2016) and could at least be a partial backup for MAVEN\u2019s communication relay functionality with the ground-based units, in particular the two active rovers. ExoMars has a less ideal orbit for large data transfers, which would hamper scientific research.<\/p>\n<p>With neither the Chinese nor UAE orbiters capable of serving as a relay, this puts the burden on a potential replacement orbiter, such as the suggested <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mars_Telecommunications_Orbiter\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Mars Telecommunications Orbiter<\/a>, which was cancelled in 2005. Even if contact with MAVEN is restored, it would only have fuel for a few more years. This makes a replacement essential if we wish to keep doing ground-based science missions on Mars, as well as any potential manned missions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the orbit of NASA\u2019s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft took it behind the Red Planet&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":180861,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-180860","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}