Following a six-month battle to regain communication with its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft around Mars, NASA announced the conclusion of the MAVEN mission on June 3rd. The mission, which launched to the red planet in 2013, studied the Martian atmosphere and its evolution for 11 years — over a decade longer than initially expected.
Though MAVEN is no longer making new measurements at Mars, the data it collected remains highly valuable for planetary scientists and continues to be analyzed. One team of scientists recently used MAVEN data to discover an atmospheric effect in Mars’ atmosphere that deflects incoming solar wind in the absence of a magnetosphere.