NASA has declared the end of its MAVEN mission after losing contact with the Mars probe six months ago. The spacecraft, which launched in 2013 and spent over a decade studying the Red Planet's atmosphere and how solar wind strips away gases, fell silent last summer. Controllers made repeated attempts to reestablish communication but ultimately concluded the probe was beyond recovery. MAVEN's data fundamentally changed scientists' understanding of how Mars lost most of its atmosphere over billions of years, transforming from a potentially habitable world with liquid water into the cold, dry desert we see today.