From Newsgroup: sci.misc
From the -2evil forces on far side of Mars-+ department:
Feed: SoylentNews
Title: After 11 Years At Mars, NASA's MAVEN Spacecraft Went Out With A
Whisper
Author: janrinok
Date: Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:36:00 +0000
Link:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=26/06/06/1848239&from=rss
Arthur T Knackerbracket[1] writes:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/after-11-years-at-mars-nasas-maven -spacecraft-went-out-with-a-whisper/[2]
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 communication[3] triggered 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 of saving the mission faded
over time, and NASA officials announced Wednesday that they're giving
up on it.
It will take some time for engineers to try to unravel what happened
to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft,
which launched from Earth in 2013 and arrived in orbit around Mars in
2014 to study the interaction between the Martian atmosphere and the
solar wind. MAVEN was an unqualified success, lasting 11 years at Mars
and far outliving its original prime mission. But the spacecraft's
sudden failure was a surprise. Many of NASA's planetary exploration
missions operate for decades.
With the scant information available, investigators may never
determine exactly what went wrong with MAVEN. Investigators are
combing through data the spacecraft transmitted before Mars blocked
the signal, and engineers were able to recover fragments of telemetry
from MAVEN after it reemerged from behind the planet.
"As part of this investigation, the team members at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were successful in recovering some fragments of telemetry
and Doppler shift data from the spacecraft," Moreau said. "These data
were extracted from recorded signals that were recovered during the
hours following the loss of signal."
Ground controllers didn't see these faint signals in real time. They
were recorded as part of a separate science campaign seeking to gather information about the density and dynamics of the upper Martian
atmosphere, which can distort radio signals that pass through it.
"One of the bits of that we were able to confirm is an inertial rate measurement that told us the spacecraft was spinning at about 2.7
revolutions per minute," Moreau said. "We also confirmed that that was consistent with a Doppler signature that we saw in the data. That's
faster than the spacecraft is expected to rotate, and that indicates a
problem that the spacecraft probably couldn't recover from."
Read more of this story[4] at SoylentNews.
Links:
[1]:
https://soylentnews.org/~Arthur+T+Knackerbracket/ (link)
[2]:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/after-11-years-at-mars-nasas-maven-spacecraft-went-out-with-a-whisper/ (link)
[3]:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/nasa-just-lost-contact-with-a-mars-orbiter-and-will-soon-lose-another-one/ (link)
[4]:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=26/06/06/1848239&from=rss (link)
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