The spacecraft fell silent this week after a decade measuring how Mars lost its air, but the calibrated record it left behind is the part future Mars missions will be measured against.
The last command sent to NASA's MAVEN spacecraft produced no reply. Per NPR's report on the mission's end, the orbiter has fallen silent this week, ending a roughly decade-long run of measurements at Mars. Shannon Curry, NASA's MAVEN principal investigator, framed the moment less as a failure than as a transition, characterizing the spacecraft as "hardworking" in the years leading up to the loss of contact.
MAVEN launched in 2013 with one core question: what stripped Mars of most of its air? The planet once had surface water and a thick enough atmosphere to keep it liquid. It does not now. The mission was built to identify the mechanisms behind that loss, and to keep measuring the upper atmosphere long enough for the answer to harden into a record rather than a snapshot, according to NPR's coverage of the mission's decade of operations.
What the silence does not undo is the dataset. The terabytes MAVEN returned are not locked to the hardware that gathered them, which is why the science community's attention has already moved to the archive. Future researchers can revisit those records to test new questions, recalibrate against later missions, and feed them into the simulations that will shape where the next Mars probes go and what they measure first.
Curry's framing in the segment makes the same point. MAVEN's value was never just the last observation. It was the decade of observations, taken with instruments that understood themselves well enough to be compared to each other, that gives the next round of Mars science a reliable starting line. That kind of internally consistent baseline is what turns a single mission into shared infrastructure.
The open question is what monitoring looks like once MAVEN stops listening. According to NPR, no successor has been positioned to continue the same continuous, in-situ measurements of the upper atmosphere on the same cadence. Until one does, the archive carries more than historical weight. It is the reference against which any future departure from the baseline will be measured.
For atmospheric modelers working on why a once-wet Mars became a desert, the work has moved from the spacecraft to the dataset, and the dataset does not need a battery.