One of NASA’s probes near Mars has been officially deemed “unrecoverable” after it inexplicably went black after scanning the cosmic object 3I/ATLAS.
Six months after it started to oddly spin out of control while orbiting Mars, the space agency reported on Wednesday that the MAVEN spacecraft was still not carrying out any of its scientific tasks or sending data back to Earth.
“The spacecraft was last heard on [December 6], when it experienced an unexpected loss of signal after it passed behind the Red Planet,” NASA said in a statement.The MAVEN spacecraft is not recoverable, according to the review board.
Before the probe’s close encounter with the enigmatic visitor from another solar system, MAVEN had been in orbit around Mars since 2014 and functioned as a communications relay for man-made rovers investigating the Martian surface.
Tracking 3I/ATLAS, which NASA has identified as a comet, the probe passed behind Mars before it abruptly stopped transmitting and began rotating abnormally quickly when it reappeared in Earth’s line of sight.
When MAVEN snapped a series of photos in October as the supposed comet passed the Red Planet, it was only 18 million miles distant from the fast-moving object. The photos were widely criticized for their low quality.
“These preliminary findings do not address a potential root cause for the anomaly, which still is being investigated,” NASA continued. The $583 million space probe began spinning quickly, which scientists believe caused the batteries to drain and the communications system to die.
NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft at Mars as envisioned by an artist. In 2014, the spacecraft went into orbit around the globe.
When the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS (shown) passed close to many planets in 2025, amateur astronomers used common telescopes to capture sharp photographs of it.
Although the NASA spacecraft had previously experienced minor technical problems, this was the first time in more over ten years when the probe was truly knocked down and its orbit disturbed.
When MAVEN first went dark in December, there were wild speculations on social media that the communications outage had something to do with 3I/ATLAS passing closest to Earth that same week.
Although 3I/ATLAS is not thought to have anything to do with the issues that finally caused MAVEN to shut down, NASA nevertheless faced harsh public criticism for the hazy and undetailed photographs the probe captured close to Mars, which led to accusations of an alien cover-up.
The interstellar object approached Earth close enough for amateurs to take pictures of it using standard telescopes, even without MAVEN online to track it. The images looked to show a lighted object with gas jets flowing from it.
The object was a peculiar comet with a distinct chemical composition that was haphazardly traveling through our solar system, according to scientists from NASA and the European Space Agency. Additionally, they said that the object showed no indications of life.
Harvard Professor Avi Loeb has maintained, in spite of their findings, that 3I/ATLAS has shown too many irregularities to rule out the idea that it was sent here by an unidentified intelligence.
Loeb, the director of the Galileo Project, a search for evidence of extraterrestrial life, disclosed in May that 3I/ATLAS was emitting an unexpected quantity of methane, a common byproduct of living things.
“Methane is considered a prominent biosignature in the atmospheres of exoplanets,” Loeb said in a release. “Methane could be the first detectable indication of life beyond Earth,” he continued, citing the opinions of other experts.
On December 4, 2025, weeks after viewing 3I/ATLAS and passing behind Mars’ far side, the MAVEN probe (shown) ceased broadcasting to Earth.
3I/ATLAS (shown) has distinctive characteristics, such as a huge coma, severe color changes, an anti-tail, and a very atypical course.
According to Loeb, this methane only became visible when the object got closer to the sun. He wondered if the methane could have been created by life within the ice.
He hypothesized that fragments of ice and dust that broke off the object might have carried microscopic dormant life forms and “seeded” them toward Earth and other planets 3I/ATLAS passed on its voyage in a paper published on the platform Medium on May 25.
It was like a dandelion blowing its seeds in the wind, according to Loeb. The idea of life moving across worlds on ice or rocks is known as panspermia.
NASA commended MAVEN’s achievements, pointing out that the probe’s primary function was to investigate how Mars was losing its thin atmosphere to space.
MAVEN demonstrated that, particularly during major solar flares, the sun’s wind and solar storms remove gas far more quickly than previously believed.
“The MAVEN mission has truly advanced our understanding of the Martian atmosphere and evolution,” stated Shannon Curry, principle investigator for MAVEN. The field has greatly benefited from this dataset.
“The data collected from MAVEN will continue to provide valuable insight into Mars for decades to come,” said Louise Prockter, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
