NASA declares its Mars Maven spacecraft dead after 6 months of silence

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NASA's Maven spacecraft, which has orbited Mars for over a decade gathering data on the planet's atmosphere and magnetic field, has been declared dead after six months without communication. The orbiter stopped responding in June, and engineers exhausted all recovery efforts before confirming the loss this week. Maven's decade-long mission produced crucial observations about how Mars lost most of its atmosphere to space, shedding light on why the planet transformed from a potentially habitable world with liquid water into the cold, dry desert we see today. The spacecraft's data has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of Martian climate evolution and the forces that stripped away its protective atmosphere.