After 11 years at Mars, NASA's MAVEN spacecraft went out with a whisper

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“I think the team has really experienced the loss of a loved one with the end of the mission.”

The purple color in this image shows auroras across Mars' nightside as detected in May 2024 by the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument aboard NASA's MAVEN orbiter. The brighter the purple, the more auroras were present. Credit: NASA/University of Colorado/LASP

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft was in excellent shape when it disappeared behind Mars on December 6 of last year. The routine passage, called an occultation, was supposed to last less than an hour, but ground teams didn’t hear from the spacecraft when it was supposed to regain contact with Earth.

The loss of communicationtriggered contingency plans for engineers to try to restore a link with MAVEN, which orbits Mars more than 200 million miles from Earth. To no avail, they listened for faint signals and uplinked commands in the blind. Hopes...

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