NEW YORK, December 31, 2025, 18:11 ET
- NASA has paused contact with its Mars missions during solar conjunction, delaying troubleshooting for the silent MAVEN orbiter.
- MAVEN was last heard from on Dec. 6; NASA also tried to spot it using the Curiosity rover’s camera without success.
- The temporary blackout has fueled confusion online, alongside separate claims about “signals” from an interstellar object.
NASA has entered a planned communications blackout with its Mars missions as a solar alignment known as conjunction begins, delaying efforts to re-establish contact with the MAVEN orbiter that has been silent since early December, the agency said. NASA said the pause starts Dec. 29 and it does not expect contact with any Mars missions until Jan. 16.
The timing matters because solar conjunction cuts off the routine back-and-forth needed to keep spacecraft operating smoothly and to troubleshoot anomalies. It also freezes recovery work on MAVEN at a moment when engineers are still trying to work out why it stopped responding.
MAVEN’s loss has drawn attention because it sits in Mars orbit, where spacecraft also help relay data to and from surface missions. With solar conjunction now underway, mission teams are leaning more heavily on what they already loaded onto spacecraft before the pause.
Solar conjunction occurs when the Sun moves between Earth and Mars, and charged solar plasma can corrupt radio signals. India Today reported NASA’s “no-command” period for this cycle runs from Dec. 29 to Jan. 9, when Mars appears within about three degrees of the Sun in Earth’s sky and controllers avoid sending fresh instructions. India Today
MAVEN, short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, has orbited Mars since 2014 studying the planet’s upper atmosphere and how it interacts with the solar wind, and it has also served as a communications relay for NASA’s surface rovers, the Associated Press reported earlier this month. The AP said NASA still operates other Mars orbiters, including Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey.
Some recent coverage has highlighted NASA’s unusual step of using the Curiosity rover’s camera to search for the missing orbiter along its predicted path, an effort that did not spot MAVEN.
On the surface, NASA’s Perseverance rover will continue operating through the blackout, but the agency said it will resume publishing raw images in late January once communications improve.
The blackout is a standard operational constraint for Mars missions, which are typically designed to execute stored instructions autonomously for days or weeks. Teams usually shift to lower-risk activities and accept that some data may be delayed until regular communications resume.
Some reports have described the event as “rare,” though Mars solar conjunction happens about every two years because Earth and Mars orbit the Sun at different speeds. Minute Mirror
The communications pause has also fed confusion online about unrelated space topics. A SatNews post linked MAVEN’s silence to online claims of non-natural radio emissions tied to an interstellar object designated 3I/ATLAS.
Physicist Brian Cox has pushed back on similar speculation, writing that “Comet 3I/ATLAS is a comet … entirely natural in origin,” according to The Times of India. The Times of India
NASA has not tied MAVEN’s anomaly to any external event, and it has said it plans to resume efforts to recontact the spacecraft once the conjunction window closes.
