After six months of silence and a failed recovery effort, NASA has officially ended the MAVEN mission. The fragmented telemetry that sealed its fate revealed a spacecraft spinning out of control.

MAVEN was the first successful mission designed to study the atmosphere of Mars. It also became a vital node of NASA’s communications network at the Red Planet

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft was in excellent shape when it disappeared behind Mars on December 6 of last year. The routine passage, called an occultation, was supposed to last less than an hour, but ground teams didn’t hear from the spacecraft when it was supposed to regain contact with Earth.

The agency last heard from the spacecraft on December 6. Recovered fragmentary data suggest that MAVEN was spinning unexpectedly, hinting at a change in its trajectory and draining its batteries

An iconic spacecraft orbiting Mars has entered its final days after more than a decade of service. But the mission was only supposed to last a year.

According to NASA, the spacecraft launched with enough fuel to keep it running until 2030, but the agency lost contact with MAVEN after it emerged from behind Mars on December 6. Telemetry data showed that all its subsystems had been working normally prior to the loss of signal, but attempts to reestablish contact were unsuccessful.

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON, May 29 (Reuters) - NASA announced on Tuesday the end of the mission of its MAVEN spacecraft, which spent more than 11 years orbiting Mars to study the atmosphere of Earth's planetary neighbor,

A routine pass behind Mars marked the end of an era for one of NASA’s most important space missions. After more than a decade orbiting the Red Planet and delivering groundbreaking insights into its atmosphere,

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft swept within 2,864 miles of Mars on May 15, 2026, grabbing a roughly 1,000-mph speed boost that bent its flight path about one degree closer to the plane of its target, the metal-rich asteroid 16 Psyche.