Sierra Space’s Space Systems division traces its manufacturing heritage to Sierra Nevada Corporation’s work on NASA and U.S. Department of Defense missions including GPS III, Mars 2020, MAVEN, and Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) spacecraft.
NASA confirmed that MAVEN is no longer recoverable after an abrupt loss of contact on 6 December.
The anomaly review board concluded that the rotation likely drained MAVEN’s batteries, cutting power to communications and leaving the spacecraft in an unrecoverable state.
NASA has not identified a root cause for the MAVEN anomaly and is still investigating it.
The anomaly review board determined that MAVEN is not recoverable and can no longer perform science and data relay functions.
NASA launched MAVEN in November 2013.
NASA convened an anomaly review board in February to evaluate recovery efforts and assess MAVEN’s state.
NASA last received a signal from MAVEN on December 6 after the spacecraft passed behind Mars in its orbit and unexpectedly lost contact.
NASA has begun the decommissioning process for MAVEN and will archive the full mission dataset for science and exploration communities.
MAVEN was part of NASA’s Mars Relay Network and supported communications between Mars surface missions and Earth.
Shannon Curry is MAVEN’s principal investigator and a researcher at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder.
DIANA requires applicant solutions to interoperate with the Maven Smart System NATO (MSS NATO).
Maven fuses drone feeds, satellite imagery, signals intelligence, and radar data into a single targeting interface.
Maven depends on imaging satellites, communications satellites, signals intelligence satellites, and GPS timing and positioning data.
The Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer said the Maven targeting platform compressed what previously took hours into minutes.
The MAVEN spacecraft recently experienced a loss of contact.
Efforts to restore contact with the MAVEN Mars orbiter will resume on January 15, 2026, after solar conjunction ends.
Since its arrival in 2014, MAVEN has provided significant data on Martian atmospheric conditions.
NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft has remained silent since December 6, 2025, after contact was lost during a routine orbital pass behind the Martian disk.
MAVEN failed to re-establish a link following a standard occultation period, and NASA has not confirmed if this anomaly is due to hardware failure or a synchronization error within the Deep Space Network.