A NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars may be dead

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, which has orbited Mars since 2014, went quiet abruptly in early December. Efforts to reestablish a connection have been unsuccessful.

For nearly a month, NASA has been scrambling to make contact with a spacecraft in orbit around Mars that abruptly fell silent.

The space agency lost communication with the MAVEN probe (short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) on Dec. 6, and efforts to re-establish a connection have been futile. Based on bits of data received that day, mission controllers think the probe was spinning unexpectedly.

NASA now has to wait until Jan. 16 before it can again try to revive MAVEN, because Mars and Earth have been on opposite sides of the sun since Monday, resulting in a prolonged communications blackout.

Overall, it’s not looking promising for one of NASA’s workhorse missions.

Since the MAVEN spacecraft entered orbit around Mars in 2014, it has been studying the red planet’s upper atmosphere, including a plasma layer known as the ionosphere, and investigating how and why Mars has been losing its atmosphere over billions of years. The spacecraft has also been instrumental in relaying communications between two rovers on the surface of Mars, Curiosity and Perseverance, and Earth.