AILSA CHANG, HOST:
NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is officially dead. MAVEN stands for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, and the spacecraft launched in 2013. It circled Mars for more than a decade, studying the red planet's atmosphere, observing an interstellar comet and provided a vital communications link for the rovers crawling all around the planet. Well, six months ago, MAVEN abruptly stopped communicating, and now NASA says the craft is, quote, "unrecoverable" and its mission over. To understand MAVEN's legacy, we called up Shannon Curry, principal investigator on the mission. Welcome.
SHANNON CURRY: Thank you so much for having me.
CHANG: So when this news first came down that the MAVEN spacecraft had gone silent back in December, what went through your mind? Like, I understand you got a call in the middle of the night.
CURRY: Yeah. Back on December 6 of 2025, I got a call from my project manager, Rich, at around 4 a.m., that we had lost contact with the spacecraft. And that's one of those calls you never, never want to get. My stomach really dropped when I heard that. We had never had a loss of signal before. We had had different kinds of anomalies. But a loss of signal is one of the most serious things that can happen to a spacecraft.
CHANG: Well, as we said, we want to look back on what was MAVEN's legacy. So, you know, this is a spacecraft that has been studying Mars for quite some time. Just give us a sense of what we have learned from MAVEN.
CURRY: MAVEN has discovered that storms coming off the sun, which we call space weather, have eroded Mars' atmosphere exponentially. And you can almost think of it like a hurricane eroding the coastline somewhere.
CHANG: Oh, wow. And how does understanding the erosion of the atmosphere on Mars help us if we were to, say, send humans to the planet one day?
CURRY: Well, understanding how the atmosphere has evolved over time tells us a lot about where the water went on Mars. We know that oceans of water existed but then eventually went away billions of years ago. And so when the atmosphere eroded away, there went the water. But when we start looking forward, understanding the atmosphere of Mars today can also help us safeguard our assets - our robotic assets and our human assets - when we start to think about more exploration of Mars. Because we really want to make sure we understand things like the radiation environment and things like space weather storms.
CHANG: Well, in the meantime, like, how are you and your whole MAVEN team feeling right now? You know, now that NASA has officially declared MAVEN dead and this mission over, does it kind of feel like the band's breaking up a little bit?
CURRY: It absolutely does. We've been really devastated about this. Frankly, it has felt like losing a loved one. But many of us are starting to move into that phase of gratitude for being able to do such incredible science at Mars and getting to work with each other. It's really the best team.
CHANG: That's so cool. What are you looking forward to next? Like, for Mars exploration and science, is there, like, a new mission that you're already beginning to think about, focus on?
CURRY: Yeah. I'm really excited about NASA's ESCAPADE mission. So NASA launched this twin set of satellites last November to Mars, and it's going to arrive there next year. And ESCAPADE's main goal is to investigate how the solar wind interacts with Mars' magnetic environment. That's another one of these missions that'll really help us understand the environment before humans actually get there. And this week, NASA announced the Artemis III mission, and we're all so excited about lunar exploration and what the entire Artemis series will do when we start to think about human space flight.
CHANG: That is Shannon Curry of the University of Colorado Boulder, the principal investigator on NASA's MAVEN mission. Thank you so much.
CURRY: Thank you so much. It was great talking to you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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