A Martian Coincidence

Since the topic of moving toward more emphasis on going to Mars than to the moon, a follow-on story today underlines the reality that current satellites observing the Red Planet are not just the rovers on the surface, but others in orbit. An issue with all of them is that they're not recent launches and so they're getting older. Those satellites always have a rated lifetime and while many of those have operated far beyond the specified life, they all eventually wear out or fail in some other way. We need more of them.

NASA has lost contact with one its three spacecraft orbiting Mars, the agency announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, a second Mars orbiter is perilously close to running out of fuel, and the third mission is running well past its warranty. 

Ground teams last heard from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft on Saturday, December 6. “Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the red planet,” NASA said in a short statement. “After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.”

The oddity that jumps off the page at me is that MAVEN is said to be the newest of NASA’s three operational Mars orbiters - and it arrived at Mars 11 years ago: 2014. It launched 10 months before that in 2013 so it has been operational for more like 12 years than 11. When the newest probe is 11 years old, that doesn't sound like they have much of a chance to be useful to missions another 11 years into the future - or more.  

Built by Lockheed Martin, MAVEN has far outlived its original design life. More recently, MAVEN became an important node in NASA’s Mars relay network, passing signals between rovers on the Martian surface and controllers on Earth. If NASA is unable to revive the MAVEN spacecraft, the agency has two other orbiters that can pick up the slack. 

MAVEN is a child compared to other satellites observing Mars.

But NASA’s two other Mars orbiters have been in space for more than 20 years. The older of the two, named Mars Odyssey, has been at Mars since 2001 and will soon run out of fuel, probably some time in the next couple of years. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2005, is healthy for its age, with enough fuel to last into the 2030s. MRO is also important to NASA because it has the best camera at Mars, with the ability to map landing sites for future missions.

What the groups behind a story like this are most concerned about is losing high speed data links back to Earth. Both of NASA's newer Mars rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance, have the capability for direct-to-Earth radio communication, but the orbiting relay network can support vastly higher data throughput. They're concerned that if those overhead satellites fail, much of the science data and spectacular images collected by NASA’s rovers might never make it off the planet. 

Technicians work on the MAVEN spacecraft at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida ahead of its launch in 2013. Image Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

NASA began planning for a dedicated Mars Telecommunications satellite more than 20 years ago, but cancelled the project in 2005. That's one of the reasons the rovers that can communicate with Earth directly; they have that hardware (or close to it) built on. The orbiting communications satellite concept appeared again this year in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed this July. 

The space agency has investigated using commercial relay services to replace the government-owned network currently in place at Mars. NASA awarded study contracts to Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, and SpaceX in 2024 to examine possible data relay architectures.

... Lawmakers included $700 million for a “high-performance” telecom relay station in Mars orbit to be developed through a fixed-price contract. ...

The agency hasn't released any formal request for bids for such a Communications Satellite, but Blue Origin and Rocket Lab have let out some design concepts for a Mars telecom orbiter.