A Nasa spacecraft which has been orbiting Mars since a little more than a decade has lost control with the American space agency which has been trying to re-establish communications link. The spacecraft has been orbiting Mars since 2014.
Nasa’s spacecraft orbiting Mars for decade loses communication link
A Nasa spacecraft which has been orbiting Mars since a little more than a decade has lost control with the American space agency which has been trying to re-establish communications link. The spacecraft has been orbiting Mars since 2014.
Last weekend, Maven suddenly lost connection with Earth-based ground stations, while the agency said that it had been working properly before going behind Mars on December 6, this phase is called occultation which happens when the spacecraft makes regular orbits of the red planet. Even after its reappearance there was silence.
“Telemetry showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind [Mars],” Nasa said in a statement.
After it appeared it could not reconnect with Nasa’s Deep Space Network and failed to give any signals to the earth-station team monitoring the mission. This alerted the team which initiated immediate investigation.
“The spacecraft and operations teams are investigating the anomaly to address the situation. More information will be shared once it becomes available,” Nasa added. The statement comes as the US space agency is trying to determine the actual cause of the failure.
Maven, which was launched in 2013, started studying the atmosphere in the upper region of the red planet and its link with the solar wind once reaching the red planet the following year. According to scientists, Mars is rapidly losing a majority of its atmosphere to space over the eons due to the Sun which has turned its atmosphere from wet and warm to dry and cold in the present day.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: dnaindia.com
