Overview
- Contact dropped when MAVEN passed behind Mars on December 6 during a routine occultation, with telemetry indicating all subsystems were normal beforehand.
- NASA reports the cause remains unknown and says further details will follow after analysis of the pre-loss data.
- Operations crews are sending blind pings along the predicted orbit in hopes the spacecraft is responsive but unable to point its antenna.
- In orbit since 2014, MAVEN studies the Martian atmosphere and also relays UHF data for the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers.
- A prolonged outage would reduce Mars–Earth bandwidth and push more reliance onto older orbiters such as Mars Odyssey and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.