NASA has yet to re-establish contact with the MAVEN Mars spacecraft despite ongoing efforts, agency officials said Monday (March 16).
NASA lost contact with MAVEN on December 6, 2025, after the spacecraft was expected to emerge from the far side of Mars. Communications received two days earlier showed the spacecraft was operating normally — with “no indication of any problems whatsoever,” said Louise Prockter, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, during a town hall at this year’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. However, analysis of a fragment of tracking data from the day contact was lost suggests that MAVEN rotated in an unexpected way as it appeared behind Mars and was no longer in its planned orbit, according to NASA.
Prockter said no signals have been detected by NASA’s Deep Space Network since one planned two-week communication gap ended January 16. The planned break in communications, caused by a solar conjunction – when the sun aligns between Earth and Mars – prevents signal interference and avoids sending partial or garbled commands that could trigger unintended behavior in the spacecraft. NASA resumed attempts to contact MAVEN after the solar conjunction ended, but those attempts have so far been unsuccessful, Prockter said. “We haven’t officially said MAVEN is lost yet. We’re still looking for it.”
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NASA has deployed additional assets to locate the spacecraft, including the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory. The agency also attempted to detect MAVEN from the Martian surface by directing the Curiosity rover to point its camera at the sky, but no sign of the spacecraft was found.
At a separate meeting in January, Prockter had said that recovery was “highly unlikely” after the spacecraft had been out of contact for more than a month. NASA has since convened an Anomaly Assessment Committee to evaluate potential recovery efforts, assess the condition of the spacecraft, and determine any likelihood of recovery.
But it is still unclear how long these efforts will continue before the mission is officially declared over.
Launched in 2013, MAVEN spent a dozen years studying how Mars lost its atmosphere, helping scientists understand how the planet transformed from a warmer, wetter world into the cold desert seen today. Originally built for a one-year mission, MAVEN marked its 10 year anniversary in September 2024.
Beyond science, MAVEN also supports operations by relaying approximately 20% of communications between Earth and surface missions, including NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers.
“I wanted to take a moment to celebrate the entire MAVEN team for all they’ve accomplished,” Prockter said during Monday’s town hall, “and for their absolutely heroic efforts during the final spacecraft recovery effort.”
With MAVEN now silent, other spacecraft – including NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey, and the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter – take on a larger part of the relay duties. NASA said it has scheduled additional communications passes and changed daily schedules for the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers to maintain science operations.
In parallel, NASA is considering options to support its aging Mars relay infrastructure and potentially replace MAVEN if it is ultimately declared lost, although Prockter declined to provide further details. ONE budget reconciliation bill passed last year allocates $700 million for a “high-performance Mars telecommunications orbit,” and Blue Origin has proposed his own Mars telecom orbiter which it says could launch by 2028.
“We know they’re not all going to last forever,” Prockter said. “The agency is thinking about what’s next for Mars.”
