NPR’s Ailsa Chang talks with Shannon Curry, principal investigator on NASA’s MAVEN mission, concerning the spacecraft’s decade of observations of Mars.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft is formally lifeless. MAVEN stands for Mars Ambiance and Unstable Evolution, and the spacecraft launched in 2013. It circled Mars for greater than a decade, finding out the purple planet’s ambiance, observing an interstellar comet and supplied a significant communications hyperlink for the rovers crawling throughout the planet. Nicely, six months in the past, MAVEN abruptly stopped speaking, and now NASA says the craft is, quote, “unrecoverable” and its mission over. To know MAVEN’s legacy, we known as up Shannon Curry, principal investigator on the mission. Welcome.
SHANNON CURRY: Thanks a lot for having me.
CHANG: So when this information first got here down that the MAVEN spacecraft had gone silent again in December, what went by means of your thoughts? Like, I perceive you bought a name in the midst of the evening.
CURRY: Yeah. Again on December 6 of 2025, I bought a name from my venture supervisor, Wealthy, at round 4 a.m., that we had misplaced contact with the spacecraft. And that is a kind of calls you by no means, by no means wish to get. My abdomen actually dropped after I heard that. We had by no means had a lack of sign earlier than. We had had completely different sorts of anomalies. However a lack of sign is among the most severe issues that may occur to a spacecraft.
CHANG: Nicely, as we stated, we wish to look again on what was MAVEN’s legacy. So, you recognize, it is a spacecraft that has been finding out Mars for fairly a while. Simply give us a way of what we’ve got discovered from MAVEN.
CURRY: MAVEN has found that storms coming off the solar, which we name area climate, have eroded Mars’ ambiance exponentially. And you may virtually consider it like a hurricane eroding the shoreline someplace.
CHANG: Oh, wow. And the way does understanding the erosion of the ambiance on Mars assist us if we have been to, say, ship people to the planet in the future?
CURRY: Nicely, understanding how the ambiance has developed over time tells us loads about the place the water went on Mars. We all know that oceans of water existed however then ultimately went away billions of years in the past. And so when the ambiance eroded away, there went the water. However once we begin trying ahead, understanding the ambiance of Mars at the moment can even assist us safeguard our property – our robotic property and our human property – once we begin to consider extra exploration of Mars. As a result of we actually wish to ensure we perceive issues just like the radiation atmosphere and issues like area climate storms.
CHANG: Nicely, within the meantime, like, how are you and your entire MAVEN group feeling proper now? You already know, now that NASA has formally declared MAVEN lifeless and this mission over, does it type of really feel just like the band’s breaking apart a bit bit?
CURRY: It completely does. We have been actually devastated about this. Frankly, it has felt like shedding a cherished one. However many people are beginning to transfer into that section of gratitude for having the ability to do such unimaginable science at Mars and attending to work with one another. It is actually one of the best group.
CHANG: That is so cool. What are you trying ahead to subsequent? Like, for Mars exploration and science, is there, like, a brand new mission that you simply’re already starting to consider, deal with?
CURRY: Yeah. I am actually enthusiastic about NASA’s ESCAPADE mission. So NASA launched this twin set of satellites final November to Mars, and it may arrive there subsequent 12 months. And ESCAPADE’s predominant purpose is to analyze how the photo voltaic wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic atmosphere. That is one other certainly one of these missions that’ll actually assist us perceive the atmosphere earlier than people truly get there. And this week, NASA introduced the Artemis III mission, and we’re all so enthusiastic about lunar exploration and what the whole Artemis collection will do once we begin to consider human area flight.
CHANG: That’s Shannon Curry of the College of Colorado Boulder, the principal investigator on NASA’s MAVEN mission. Thanks a lot.
CURRY: Thanks a lot. It was nice speaking to you.
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