A hardworking spacecraft in Mars orbit has gone darkish

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft is formally useless. MAVEN stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, and the spacecraft launched in 2013. It circled Mars for greater than a decade, finding out the pink planet’s ambiance, observing an interstellar comet and supplied a significant communications hyperlink for the rovers crawling throughout the planet. Well, six months in the past, MAVEN abruptly stopped speaking, and now NASA says the craft is, quote, “unrecoverable” and its mission over. To perceive MAVEN’s legacy, we known as up Shannon Curry, principal investigator on the mission. Welcome.

SHANNON CURRY: Thank you a lot for having me.

CHANG: So when this information first got here down that the MAVEN spacecraft had gone silent again in December, what went by means of your thoughts? Like, I perceive you bought a name in the course of the night time.

CURRY: Yeah. Back on December 6 of 2025, I bought a name from my venture supervisor, Rich, at round 4 a.m., that we had misplaced contact with the spacecraft. And that is a kind of calls you by no means, by no means need to get. My abdomen actually dropped once I heard that. We had by no means had a lack of sign earlier than. We had had totally different sorts of anomalies. But a lack of sign is among the most severe issues that may occur to a spacecraft.

CHANG: Well, as we stated, we need to look again on what was MAVEN’s legacy. So, you recognize, it is a spacecraft that has been finding out Mars for fairly a while. Just give us a way of what we have now discovered from MAVEN.

CURRY: MAVEN has found that storms coming off the solar, which we name house climate, have eroded Mars’ ambiance exponentially. And you may virtually consider it like a hurricane eroding the shoreline someplace.

CHANG: Oh, wow. And how does understanding the erosion of the ambiance on Mars assist us if we had been to, say, ship people to the planet sooner or later?

CURRY: Well, understanding how the ambiance has developed over time tells us lots about the place the water went on Mars. We know that oceans of water existed however then finally went away billions of years in the past. And so when the ambiance eroded away, there went the water. But once we begin wanting ahead, understanding the ambiance of Mars immediately also can assist us safeguard our property – our robotic property and our human property – once we begin to consider extra exploration of Mars. Because we actually need to be sure we perceive issues just like the radiation surroundings and issues like house climate storms.

CHANG: Well, within the meantime, like, how are you and your complete MAVEN crew feeling proper now? You know, now that NASA has formally declared MAVEN useless and this mission over, does it form of really feel just like the band’s breaking apart slightly bit?

CURRY: It completely does. We’ve been actually devastated about this. Frankly, it has felt like dropping a beloved one. But many people are beginning to transfer into that part of gratitude for having the ability to do such unimaginable science at Mars and attending to work with one another. It’s actually the most effective crew.

CHANG: That’s so cool. What are you wanting ahead to subsequent? Like, for Mars exploration and science, is there, like, a brand new mission that you just’re already starting to consider, deal with?

CURRY: Yeah. I’m actually enthusiastic about NASA’s ESCAPADE mission. So NASA launched this twin set of satellites final November to Mars, and it’ll arrive there subsequent yr. And ESCAPADE’s primary aim is to analyze how the photo voltaic wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic surroundings. That’s one other one in all these missions that’ll actually assist us perceive the surroundings earlier than people really get there. And this week, NASA introduced the Artemis III mission, and we’re all so enthusiastic about lunar exploration and what all the Artemis collection will do once we begin to consider human house flight.

CHANG: That is Shannon Curry of the University of Colorado Boulder, the principal investigator on NASA’s MAVEN mission. Thank you a lot.

CURRY: Thank you a lot. It was nice speaking to you. Transcript supplied by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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