When the orbit of NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft took it behind the Red Planet on December 6th, ground controllers expected a temporary loss of signal (LoS). Unfortunately, the Deep Space Network hasn’t heard from the science orbiter since. Engineers are currently trying to troubleshoot this issue, but without a sign of life from the stricken spacecraft, there are precious few options.
As noted by [Stephen Clark] over at ArsTechnica this is a pretty big deal. Even though MAVEN was launched in November of 2013, it’s a spring chicken compared to the other Mars orbiters. The two other US orbiters: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey, are significantly older by around a decade. Of the two ESA orbiters, Mars Express and ExoMars, the latter is fairly new (2016) and could at least be a partial backup for MAVEN’s communication relay functionality with the ground-based units, in particular the two active rovers. ExoMars has a less ideal orbit for large data transfers, which would hamper scientific research.
With neither the Chinese nor UAE orbiters capable of serving as a relay, this puts the burden on a potential replacement orbiter, such as the suggested Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, which was cancelled in 2005. Even if contact with MAVEN is restored, it would only have fuel for a few more years. This makes a replacement essential if we wish to keep doing ground-based science missions on Mars, as well as any potential manned missions.
Enough with this Mars nonsense, and absurd waste of money. We can’t even live and get along here on Earth and you all are wanting to go to Mars.
enough with this fire nonsense, you all can’t stop fighting with sticks and you all want to burn things down
Don’t get me started about those new ways to get India.
Boiled mutton was good enough for my grandfather. There’s no need for these so-called “spices” that just inflame the passions and dilute your vital fluids
Everyone knows the martians are using 5G to activate the nanobots in the vaccine in order to make us all encourage DOGE to give money to Elon so that we will send our technology to their planet.
Fortunately, I have this hat made of a thin, highly flexible metal that protects me!
right now elon is cutting my internet bill in half.
I’m not a fan of Elon as a person, and haven’t been since before it was cool to hate him. But Starlink was the only reliable option for usable broadband out in the sticks where I live. It’s been fantastic. It cost about twice as much as what I had before, but for significantly more than twice the bandwith and almost zero downtime.
Sure it would be nice to be able to shop on principles, but in this day and age if you’re only going to spend money with companies that are “good,” well… on the plus side you’ll be cutting down on your spending significantly.
im more of a moon first guy anyway. permanent residence and bootstrap industry.
also that datacenter in space thing makes more sense on the moon as you can bury the servers to protect from radiation and use the regolith as a ground source heatsink. you can power it with nuclear reactors since the zoning commission on the moon doesn’t have any bureaucrats yet. im sure you can get an smr into the starship cargo bay.
It´s a pipe dream. It would be magnitude orders more expensive, and near impossible to maintain. But in order to make it possible, we would be ready to send you there with a shovel to start excavations immediately, you´ll enjoy a bureaucrat-free and oxygen free retirement.
Not THAT hard. But you need automated excavators and all that. You don’t need people there for construction/excavation. And 1 atmosphere of air can support about 10 meters of regolith, so once pressurized there is no limit on size, or supporting a roof with shielding while structural supports are added. What would the elderly wealthy pay for a retirement suite in 1/6 g? Of course the 1/3 g of Mars would also be mighty nice. Hmmm. Not only nice on the aches and pains, but you won’t break anything if you fall. If Musk was focused on the Moon instead of Mars……
And you can tunnel at least 24km (15 miles) deep. Probably much more considering no heat and water problems.
Keep in mind that the first belligerent country or person to land some AAA on the Moon will own it and all trans-Lunar space and Earth orbit.
Wanting to study Mars =/= wanting to go colonize Mars.
Enough with this antiprogressive nonsense, and absurd waste of everyone’s time. We can’t even live and get along here on Hackaday and you all are wanting to leave tripe in the comments. Read a book Mike
You’ve got it backwards. The cost of a war far exceeds the cost of automated Mars exploration. Stop wars, use the saved money for exploration.
Don’t use the saved money for social programs; experience since ending the Vietnam war demonstrates that they do more harm than good.
Dude, you know that the money doesn’t actually go to Mars, right?
Money spent on Mars research goes to NASA, which uses it to pay its employees & contractors, who then re-circulate it back into the economy.
Want to save 50% of NASA’s budget? End human spaceflight. It has a horrendous cost versus science ratio because the difficult and very expensive to keep alive in space biological payloads are mostly just along for the ride. Spam in a can as Chuck Yeager called those in the Mercury capsules. The MAVEN mission thus far has cost about 1/6th of what it costs just to support the ISS every year. Book: The End of Astronauts: Why Robots are the Future of Exploration (2022)
I’m surprised any of them are still running. Or at least that we can still communicate with them. I don’t have much hope anymore. The current regime in the US will defund and destroy everything.
I know this comment is going to get deleted.
HaD needs to realize though, politics ARE on topic now. Between tariffs messing with our supplies and the constant defunding of science taking away that which inspires many of us in the first place… there will be not future for hackers if they don’t get very politically active!
In a future where citizens are rolling wheel barrows full of “Weimar” dollars to the store to buy a loaf of bread, the cost of a Chinese arduino clone on Temu will be the least of their concerns.
You can’t spend money you don’t have… not even if you’re the one with the printing press. Sooner or later the piper will be paid.
Anybody want to bet on the first major currency to go ‘pop’?
Let’s make the bet 50 7.62×39 coin?
I’ve got the English pound.
We used to build things to last indefinitely…
We used to have the hubris to believe we could build things to last indefinitely.
agreed
Because spending billions on NGO grift is… better?
There is plenty of taxpayer money that could be used for all kinds of science and exploration, space and otherwise. We simply have to stop squandering that money on dumb things.
For example: A BILLION dollars of government fraud in Minnesota was just revealed…and that’s one instance. Any doubt in your mind that this is just the tip of the iceberg? I could name a half-dozen similar scams off the top of my head.
Give me a red magic marker and I’d have no problem eliminating enough waste in our federal budget to assure proper science funding in all disciplines.
If you don’t like the current “regimes” priorities, you’re entitled to your opinion. But pretending we can continue spending as we have been is no longer an option.
Being a responsible adult is about making tough decisions. Some people will like those decisions, some won’t.
“red magic marker and I’d have no problem eliminating enough waste in our federal budget” reminds me something and we saw how it ended up.
Only took him a few week to realize we were doomed and it was pointless.
Rome wasn’t burnt in a day.
Adults? On my continent people reading news do wonder if there are any of them being left over there (in the US).
And it’s not even meant as a joke or for trolling.
We’re stunned, rather, I’d say. It’s like watching the Titanic, sink.
“We’re stunned, rather, I’d say. It’s like watching the Titanic, sink.”
If you like being stunned, you’ll love this headline from Reuters:
“EU agrees to end Russian gas imports by late 2027”
So let’s read between the lines: Russia invades Ukraine in 2022… You spend three years grifting, whining and complaining that the middle-class American taxpayer , whose share of our national debt already exceeds $9000 per household, isn’t “contributing’ enough to the defense of a foreign country he probably can’t find on a map and has no vested interest in, while members of YOUR union, even now, actively fund Putin and the Russian war machine with their gas and oil purchases? That is insane.
Add to that the fact that you have nearly 14 trillion euros of your own debt, and I stop caring about your opinion of how American tax money should be spent. Just sayin’.
It is. I remember how we were openly threatened by nukes in a speech on TV when the war began years ago.
How (not) long it takes until one reaches European capital cities..
But it’s not only that president that worries us, maybe.
In fact, we’re worried about both eastern and western relationships alike and try to figure out how to deal with it.
What adults normally do when being faced with aggression and childish behavior
is trying to keep calm and not escalate things further, I think.
It’s often being miss-interpreted as weekness, though.
Please let’s think about it for a moment.
If you’re stopping all kind of businesses or diplomatic relationships immediately,
you’re also finding yourself in a position of loosing any kind of means to reason with someone.
The whole idea of the EU or the prior EEC or EC was that states who have an economic relationship won’t make war with each other.
That’s why EU is more of an economic power, rather than a mil. one.
The North Stream 2 pipeline, for example, was a peace project also.
By doing business with former Soviet Russia, by establishing a provider-customer relationship after cold war.
Germany historically was important here because it was the former separation line between east and west.
Similarily, decades earlier, W-Germany also had accepted a trade agreement with E-Germany, to de-escalate.
East German products were sold rebranded in West Germany under different names via mail order companies such as Quelle.
That helped stabilizing E-Germany, reducing distrust and establishing diplomatic relationships.
Btw, peace and stability also was thing between US and Russian co-operation in space program and the building of ISS (ex MIR-2/Alpha).
When USSR dissolved, there was a fear that rocket engineers would seek new jobs all around the globe, doing crazy things.
By working together, the engineers stayed and kept working on civil projects.
That being said, I’m highly speaking under correction here.
The only thing I can say for sure is that the current situation is delicate and needs sensitive handling.
Or let’s put it this way, what happens to the US if Europe destabilzes and falls apart?
Being protected by a big oceanic gap that won’t affect you guys directly or immediately.
But what happens on the long run? Who might take our role?
Who are you’re continuing to do business with? China, India?
Personally, I have no idea. But it’s something to think about, maybe.
Europe and EU might be nasty not seldomly,
but both at least used to share common values and principles.
If there was a magic way to switch suppliers, EU would have fully switch long ago. Say you want to switch your supplier of water, tell me how you´d do ? put up a bottle conditioning factory and a logistic chain ? that´s what was done , but it´s not enough. Building new pipes ? takes time, and which route ? There are works on the way.
Russia exactly counted on being isolated being quasi impossible. It´s hard and takes times but it not impossible. It has a cost for sure.
But yes as often, simplistic and ignorant ranting about “american taxpayer dollars”
Eat that: American wealth is mainly based of its capacity of borrowing money to sustain the dollar. And this will be harder and harder, so buckle up.
“while members of YOUR union, even now, actively fund Putin and the Russian war machine with their gas and oil purchases? That is insane.”
Well, we have been actively funding several of your former president’s war machines as well. No need to be jealous.
I see the reasons for your opinion. But don’t try to speak for all American taxpayers. I for one do not think that a growing, more powerful Russia glancing over at Alaska with that ever-take-more gleam in their eyes is in our interests regardless how dumb Europe might be acting about their oil.
The Bering strait is too damn narrow for Russia to be a purely European problem.
And then there is the example China and their North Korean puppet would take from an abandonment of Ukraine and our technological dependence on Taiwan and South Korea…
If you want to be “America First”… fine. Russia is an American problem too. Besides, take a look at how the US ended up in both of the world wars. History shows us that isolationism is NOT in our interest. It just makes the war worse and we get dragged in anyway.
No question fraud is a thing that happens and always will happen. But with the current regime’s track record.. if you want to quote recently “discovered” “fraud” you need to be very specific regarding what you think was found and what the evidence was. Otherwise it’s a pretty safe assumption you bought some lying propaganda and are sharing it.
Maybe the martians have taken it for studying ?
Would any of this have to do with the recent CME events that have been plaguing the Sun? Did Maven get hit by a Carrington Event??
Anything’s possible, but it seems unlikely. I think if there had been a CME pointed at Mars with enough energy to take out a spaceship, they would definitely be talking about that as a suspected cause.
More likely the failure is caused by what most spacecraft failures are caused by: The fact that space is HARD.
Possibly, I believe Mars suffers significantly more effect from CME events than earth because of it’s lack of magnetosphere
You´re wrong, it has one. Just weaker than earth.
Meanwhile whistling tunelessly, 3I/Atlas is saying “look at my pretty jets!”
If I have learned anything from Voyager 2, its that it will not be surprising if this craft comes back online 20 years from now, ready to accept commands and working as if it never stopped.
Can only imagine how nerve wracking this must be for the engineers. The worst I’ve done this week was miss a poka-yoke mechanical slot in the prototype PCB board and I still lost sleep over the silliness of it.
Something like this happened to OSCAR 7.
A fault was in the power source, the NiCD batteries.
The solar cells and the 1970s TTL logic was still going strong when the short in the power source went away.
The morse code radio beacon still transmits telemetry data, if memory serves.
Not sure about the RTTY beacon, though.
It also has two linear translators that still get used. One has a downlink on 10 meters and the other is on 2 meters.
Well first it was just photographing 3i/atlas ? Then stopped working ? Perhaps the alien AI in 3i/atlas doesnt want it transmitting anymore ? Just a thought ?
Ohh, yeah. And maybe Santa Claus put the alien AI on the naughty list, so the tooth fairy and yeti need to make a space ship to deliver all the coal, then this Mars orbiter was knocked out by the test firing of the defensive jolly beam.
We have enough stuff flying around and on that rock… may be time to start thinking about global communications infrastructure.
Think this sentence is incorrect:
“Even if contact with MAVEN is restored, it would only have fuel for a few more years.”
From the linked ars article:
“Before the loss of communications last weekend, NASA said MAVEN had sufficient fuel reserves to operate until at least the late 2030s.”
It is the oldest orbiter that will most likely run out of fuel in a few years:
“The older of the two, named Mars Odyssey, has been at Mars since 2001 and will soon run out of fuel, probably sometime in the next couple of years.”
Was astronaut Howard Wolowitz involved? Big Bang reference.