NASA, WVU say Farewell to MAVEN Mars Mission

Morgantown, W.Va. — NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission has ended after more than 11 years in orbit at Mars and a decade beyond its primary, one-year mission. The spacecraft was heard last on December 6, when it experienced an unexpected loss of signal after it passed behind the Red Planet. Read the announcement from NASA.

MAVEN launched in 2013 and arrived at Mars in 2014. It was originally designed to investigate how much of the Martian atmosphere was lost over billions of years. Through its observations, the spacecraft helped scientists better understand the processes that transformed Mars from a potentially warmer and wetter world into the cold, arid planet we see today.

Over the course of its lifetime, MAVEN had results including the discovery that the erosion of Mars’ atmosphere increases significantly during solar storms, as well as several types of auroras that light up when energy particles plunge into the atmosphere, bombarding gases and making them glow.

At West Virginia University, Professor Christopher Fowler and Dr. Catherine Regan are a part of the MAVEN mission team. Professor Fowler and his colleagues discovered indications of a phenomenon called the Zwan-Wolf effect in data MAVEN collected in December 2023 during a “coronal mass ejection event.” Their findings appeared recently in Nature Communications and WVUToday.

“MAVEN is one of those missions that will have a lasting impact on everyone that has been involved – it has personally paved my journey as an early career scientist,” said Dr. Regan. “MAVEN was operational at Mars for over 11 years, providing us with incredible amounts of data.”

Though it may seem shocking to learn the spacecraft was lost, Dr. Regan reinforced that this isn’t unusual. 

“The confirmation that it cannot be recovered is something common in space exploration – we can’t get out there to fix it! Although the mission has ended,” she said, “the science will continue.”