Engineers lose contact with Mars orbiter Maven
NASA announced late yesterday that the engineering team running the Maven Mars orbiter lost contact with the spacecraft on December 6, 2025, and are still trying to figure out what happened and regain communications.
NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft, in orbit around Mars, experienced a loss of signal with ground stations on Earth on Dec. 6. Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the Red Planet. After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.
The spacecraft and operations teams are investigating the anomaly to address the situation. More information will be shared once it becomes available.
No other information was released.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
NASA announced late yesterday that the engineering team running the Maven Mars orbiter lost contact with the spacecraft on December 6, 2025, and are still trying to figure out what happened and regain communications.
NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) spacecraft, in orbit around Mars, experienced a loss of signal with ground stations on Earth on Dec. 6. Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the Red Planet. After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.
The spacecraft and operations teams are investigating the anomaly to address the situation. More information will be shared once it becomes available.
No other information was released.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News


A modest surprise but hardly a shock. NASA commo assets in Mars orbit have always been a bit thin. Now they are appreciably thinner, with both surviving US Mars Orbiters over 20 years old.
No later than the next Mars transit window roughly a year from now, NASA should be dispatching some kind of Mars orbit commo constellation that can keep us in continuous touch with the Red Planet, except during solar occlusions, and at much higher bandwidth than currently possible. If NASA can’t be ready to do so by then, perhaps the newly ferocious Blue Origin could dispatch its Blue Ring-based Mars commo solution hence and then charge NASA by the minute for its use. Or Relativity and Impulse could do the same with a Helios-based solution. Preferably both. Or even all three if NASA can get its act together under J. Isaacman’s “encouragement.”