One among NASA’s workhorse spacecraft in orbit round Mars has fallen silent, leaving company personnel scrambling to troubleshoot the problem.
The Mars Ambiance and Unstable Evolution (MAVEN) mission launched in November 2013 and has been working on the Crimson Planet since September 2014. Like many NASA missions, MAVEN has lasted effectively past its unique design lifetime, which was one 12 months. However on December 6 one thing apparently went fallacious whereas the spacecraft was on the far facet of Mars, the facet of the planet that faces away from Earth.
“Telemetry from MAVEN had confirmed all subsystems working usually earlier than it orbited behind the Crimson Planet,” wrote NASA officers in a press release posted on December 9. “After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Area Community didn’t observe a sign.”
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The MAVEN mission’s main science aim has been to check the Martian environment and the best way it’s affected by the photo voltaic wind, the fixed stream of charged particles that flows off of our solar and throughout house.
As a secondary job, the spacecraft additionally serves as one in every of 4 spacecraft that relay communications between Earth and missions on the Martian floor; notably these missions embrace the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. The European Area Company’s (ESA’s) Exomars Hint Fuel Orbiter, which arrived at Mars in 2016, handles the majority of those transmissions, adopted by the growing older MAVEN. Two even older NASA spacecraft—the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and 2001 Mars Odyssey—mix to spherical out the relay work. ESA’s Mars Specific can be available as a backup.
MAVEN’s troubles spotlight the truth that even the community’s latest member has already been working in house for almost a decade, elevating the danger of a number of cascading failures.
Realizing the peril of stretching this community too skinny, NASA has pursued numerous next-generation orbiters for Mars communications for many years, however most of those initiatives have gone nowhere. One such scheme, provisionally dubbed the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, was first conceived greater than 20 years in the past and subsequently canceled. It was then revived earlier this 12 months with a $700-million allocation as a part of the Trump administration’s so-called One Huge Stunning Invoice Act. Even when the mission materializes, it’s years away from launch. MAVEN, in the meantime, is constructed into the company’s plans to help Mars Pattern Return, the already troubled mission meant to retrieve rock samples gathered by the Perseverance rover.
This newest glitch isn’t the primary time MAVEN has given NASA a critical scare. In 2022 the mission spent three months in secure mode, which happens when a spacecraft has a difficulty that it will probably’t resolve independently. That doubtlessly deadly hassle was brought on by the spacecraft’s inertial measurement models, which preserve MAVEN pointed within the correct orientation. The mission workforce in the end needed to replace the spacecraft with a complete new program for staying steady.
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