A NASA spacecraft that has been doing laps around Mars for more than a decade has gone silent – and no one knows why.
The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, or Maven, has been studying the red planet’s atmosphere since 2013.
But ground teams lost contact with the orbiter earlier this week after it reemerged from behind the planet.
The last automated data from Maven showed it was running smoothly before going quiet.
NASA said why Maven is giving the agency the silent treatment is unclear, though a loss of signal does happen when connections with spacecrafts are blocked by planetary bodies.
The agency added: ‘More information will be shared once it becomes available.’
Space officials are working to reestablish contact with the orbiter, which also acts as a communication relay point for the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers.
Assuming the satellite’s orbit was unaffected by what NASA called an ‘anomaly’, operators can keep trying to ping the probe as it carries out its normal flight path.
Losing Maven would be a blow to NASA, given that its second Martian probe is running out of fuel and the third is well past its sell-by date.
So, now might be the perfect time to finally get some Earthlings on Mars, according to a new paper from top American academics.
What would a trip to Mars look like?
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine says finding otherworldly life should be a top priority for a mission to Mars.
Dava Newman, an aerospace engineer who co-chaired the committee behind the report, said: ‘When our astronauts set foot on Mars, it will be one of humanity’s greatest milestones.’
Cold, barren and irradiated with an airless atmosphere that would choke you in seconds, Mars isn’t exactly a holiday hotspot for people.
But it wasn’t always a desolate wasteland – geology suggests free-flowing rivers once coursed through its now dusty canyons.
Spacefarers, rather than robotic rovers, should comb a 100km-widestretch of the clay desert for clues, academics said.
The ‘exploration zone’, the paper says, should be near surface glacial ice where life may have once wriggled inside.
Humans would stay on Mars for 30 ‘sols’, a Martian day that lasts about 24 hours and 40 minutes, before an uncrewed cargo ship drops off supplies.
Then the real human, 300-sol-long mission would kick off. A lab on the dusty surface would analyse samples, while a drill would dig 5km down for life-bearing water.
The mission would involve astronauts-turned-Martians teaming up with ‘agents’, which could include humanoid robots and rovers.
Dr Meganne Christian, a reserve astronaut with NASA’s European counterpart, the ESA, told Metro that if she were offered the chance to be involved in the first human mission to Mars, her answer would be brief.
‘Absolutely, yes,’ she said. ‘I think the first thing I would do is to look up into the sky and locate Earth.’
Robotic vehicles are slow and can only explore so far.
‘They also don’t have human intuition,’ the industrial chemist said. ‘There’s quite a famous story from the Apollo missions where one of the astronauts said, “Oh, look, that rock over there is orange, shall we go and sample that?”
‘All these scientists got really excited and said: “Yes, let’s go and sample that one” So that kind of spur-of-the-moment scientific discovery and following your intuition is not really something that robots can do.
Whether human or artificial, Ian Crawford, a professor of planetary science and astrobiology at London’s University of Birkbeck, told Metro that the intention behind a mission to Mars is just as important.
After all, it’s not only scientists and space officials who want to jet off to Mars – Elon Musk, the tech billionaire boss of the rocket company SpaceX, plans to colonise the planet one day.
‘I can see ways to solve many of the technical problems if there was a will to do so,’ Crawford said. ‘But then the question is a will by whom? Who would be driving this activity, who would be paying for it, who would be regulating it?
‘You could see a sort of Wild West approach that SpaceX may advocate, but I personally don’t think that would be in the best interest of science.’
Though Crawford himself isn’t exactly keen to be part of the first human mission to the red planet.
‘If the question was if I could go to the Moon, the answer would be yes,’ Crawford says.
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