The Maven Mission to Mars

January 9 was the moment of conjunction, that is, when Mars was behind the sun, that day Mars was about 360 million kilometers from the Earth and communications between Mars and the red planet at that time were impossible, since the Sun is getting in the way, in fact it continues to get in the way because Mars, although it is not exactly behind the Sun right now, there are several days when communications are impossible or very difficult.

As an example, NASA will not resume attempts to contact or find out what happened to the Maven spacecraft until January 16. For those who do not know, on December 9, NASA issued a statement announcing that it had lost the signal with this spacecraft.

Its mission is to analyze the Martian atmosphere looking for clues about why and how the solar wind erodes the atmosphere, something that will be essential if one day we want to terraform Mars, because if we want to create an artificial atmosphere on Mars, that is, vaporizing ice and other elements that may be there, what we do not want is for it to end up dispersing in space due to the solar wind, we will have to find a solution and know how the solar wind does to ruin the Martian atmosphere.

It also investigates what happened to the seas of Mars and incidentally also helps in communications with the rovers that are on the Martian surface and this is how the Maven ship was in its Martian things when on December 6 it was going to go behind the red planet, something routine, it makes a complete revolution every 4 and a half hours approximately, that is, it has completed about 28,700 orbits of Mars.

It is a maneuver, therefore, that he did tens of thousands of times, but which meant for about 25 to 35 minutes that the Earth would lose communications with the ship. On December 6, before entering the silence zone, the Maven's telemetry had shown that all the subsystems were working normally, except for one detail that was discovered later, days after issuing that statement and in a review carried out by experts, they discovered a special detail, but so far everything seemed normal.

After a few critical minutes, the deep space network did not receive any signal, or so it was believed when the statement was issued, because it turns out that after an in-depth analysis of all the data available, it turns out that on December 6, when leaving behind Mars, Maven managed to send a short fragment of incomplete data and that was the last that is known about it.

Until the critical days of the conjunction arrived, that is, at the end of December, when Mars was already gathering close to the Sun and solar radiation prevented us from communicating with Mars, above is the last photo that Perseverance sent, Perseverance works automatically, takes photos and sends them to Earth and they are published automatically, that is, when NASA was closed, it also took photos, but it was not published.

I took the screenshot an hour ago and this is the last photo and it is from January 1 and things were already screwed up, as you can see, nothing, not a third, not a quarter of the photo managed to send because communications are becoming more difficult every time Tuesday gets closer to the sun and on January 9 it was already impossible, it is impossible because it is behind, literally, the Perseveran resists because it has a battery, it has a plutonium battery, they are not eternal, in principle, in Mars, a solar-powered rover might not be infinite because the solar panels also wear out, mind you, but it could last decades, that is, 20, 30 years quietly until the wheels break down, which is the most delicate factor that is being seen due to the Martian terrain.

Those responsible for the NASA mission have tried to contact to find out what has happened to Maven and they have done everything, they have used the deep space network to try to continue capturing some more signals, even if they are partial, but they have even tried to use Curiosity's Mastcam camera, to try to visually locate Maven in its reference orbit and they did not succeed, that is, it is not in orbit.

The Maven right now can be stated that it is not in the planned orbit that it is guided, it has deviated, many media and scientific sources talk that the Maven could be lost or even dead after 11 years of work, one possibility is a failure, either due to solar radiation, because on those specific days in December, the sun had launched several powerful X-class flares or it could also be due to cosmic radiation from outside the solar system.

And there the suspects are cosmic rays, but it cannot be known with such certainty. Is it possible that Maven has already hit Mars? Experts say no, at least for now, since it is very possible that it had been detected, and NASA will communicate any news about it.

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