NASA has officially terminated the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, six months after losing contact with the spacecraft on December 6, 2025. The probe launched in 2013 from Cape Canaveral and began orbiting Mars in 2014, far outlasting its planned one-year primary mission.

NASA formed an anomaly review board in February to investigate the failure. The spacecraft entered safe mode and spun at an unusually high rate after passing behind Mars, draining its batteries and cutting communications. Despite working properly before the incident, the Deep Space Network detected no signal when MAVEN reemerged, confirming the probe cannot resume operations.

MAVEN's decade-plus of data revealed how solar winds continuously strip away the Martian atmosphere, transforming a once-habitable world into the cold, arid planet we see today. The mission discovered that protons create auroras across Mars—unlike Earth's polar-limited displays—and tracked how planet-wide dust storms eject water molecules into space.

NASA will publish a final report on the anomaly later this year. MAVEN's extended operation provided invaluable insights into Mars' atmospheric evolution, making it one of the most successful long-duration missions in the agency's history.