After 11 years at Mars, NASA's MAVEN spacecraft went out with a whisper

“Over the life of the mission, MAVEN supported more than 8 percent of all of our relay sessions planned by our rovers and landers, but it accounted for nearly 18 percent of all of the data returned, illustrating its usefulness when returning large data volumes,” said Tiffany Morgan, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. The network still has plenty of capacity to support the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers, with some minor caveats. “We do have remaining assets, and those assets have adjusted the amount of data that they return, and the rovers have also adjusted their planning for how they connect to those assets,” Morgan said. “There is a slight delay on occasion, because we don’t have as many assets in view, to getting our science data back, and MAVEN was critical in returning science data versus operational data. But the Mars Relay Network is resilient enough at this point in time to accommodate, for the most part, the loss of MAVEN with the added delay.” NASA is asking commercial companies to develop a replacement for the existing Mars Relay Network. The new commercial system, called the Mars Telecommunications Network , is expected to provide higher throughput and broader coverage for NASA’s future missions to the red planet. …