23.12.2025
NASA loses contact with MAVEN, Perseverance continues roving around Jezero
In early December, NASA lost contact with its MAVEN spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mars since 2014. MAVEN was supposed to reestablish communications with NASA’s Deep Space Network on Dec. 6 after emerging from behind Mars during a routine blackout period when the spacecraft’s orbit takes it behind the red planet, blocking all communications to and from Earth. Teams have worked to regain contact, but all attempts have been unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, on the Martian surface, NASA’s Perseverance rover continues to drive toward its next target in Jezero Crater, searching for signs of ancient microbial life in various rocks and minerals along the way. The rover’s team is using the time to analyze the condition of Perseverance and its components, informing new estimates of how long the rover’s mission might last.
NASA attempts to reestablish communications with MAVEN
On Saturday, Dec. 6, NASA scientists lost contact with the agency’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which is located in orbit around Mars. MAVEN launched to Mars in November 2013 and entered orbit in September 2014, where it has been studying the Martian atmosphere and its disappearance due to solar wind. MAVEN’s research into Mars’ atmospheric loss has also provided insight into the evolution of the red planet’s climate.
MAVEN launches to Mars atop an Atlas V. (Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
MAVEN’s team communicates with the spacecraft through NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN)– a worldwide network of large radio antennas that send and receive signals from NASA’s fleet of spacecraft throughout the solar system. Normally, when MAVEN’s orbit takes it behind Mars, teams briefly lose contact with the spacecraft until it emerges and reestablishes contact with the DSN. However, on Dec. 6, the DSN received no signals from MAVEN after it orbited behind Mars. Interestingly, before moving behind Mars, data sent to Earth from MAVEN on Dec. 4 showed that all its subsystems and electronics were working as expected.
In a Dec. 15 statement, NASA explained that while all attempts to regain contact with MAVEN have been unsuccessful, mission teams were able to retrieve a small amount of tracking data from Dec. 6. The tracking data revealed that MAVEN was in an unexpected spin when it emerged from behind Mars, and the frequency of the signal suggests that the spacecraft’s orbit may have been altered. NASA and MAVEN teams will continue to attempt to reestablish contact with the spacecraft over the next few weeks while analyzing tracking data for more clues about what happened when MAVEN was behind Mars.
MAVEN’s loss of contact has additional impacts on the operation of other missions at Mars, most notably surface spacecraft like Perseverance and Curiosity. MAVEN works with NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), Mars Odyssey, and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter to relay communications to and from the rovers. With MAVEN out of service as a communications relay, NASA is working with MRO, Mars Odyssey, and ESA teams to ensure communications between Earth and the rovers can continue for the next two weeks. Perseverance and Curiosity teams are also adjusting their mission planning to account for the new communications setup without MAVEN.
Perseverance continues its trek around Jezero
Feb. 18, 2026, will mark the fifth anniversary of Perseverance’s landing on Mars. In the five years since its landing, the rover has traveled an approximately 40 km path through Jezero Crater, collecting surface samples along the way and searching for signs of ancient microbial life. As 2026 draws near, the rover is now driving to a new region of Jezero named “Lac de Charmes.” There, it will search for new surface sample collection locations and targets.
As Perseverance makes its way to Lac de Charmes, the rover’s team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is evaluating the condition of its subsystems and components and how they’ve withstood 40 km of near-daily driving. JPL teams are testing duplicate parts on Earth to better understand their durability; one such test this summer confirmed that the rotary actuators in Perseverance’s wheels are expected to perform as expected for at least another 60 km of driving. JPL teams are currently performing similar tests on the rover’s braking system.
After continuous testing over two years, Perseverance teams believe the rover will continue to operate in its current condition until at least 2031. However, Perseverance is built much like its sister rover, Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, has driven 36 km up and around Mount Sharp — a 5.5 km-tall mountain at the center of Gale Crater. Curiosity’s continued operation is a good sign for the longevity of Perseverance‘s mission.
Panorama image of Lac de Charmes taken by Perseverance. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)
“These tests show the rover is in excellent shape. All the systems are fully capable of supporting a very long-term mission to extensively explore this fascinating region of Mars,” said Perseverance‘s deputy project manager Steve Lee of JPL.
While Curiosity has been on Mars for nine years longer than Perseverance, Perseverance has already driven farther than Curiosity. This is largely due to Perseverance‘s slightly faster driving speed and autonomous driving capabilities. While driving across the Martian surface, Perseverance uses an autonomous planning tool called Enhanced Autonomous Navigation (ENav), which scans a 15 m region ahead of the rover for potential hazards and obstacles. If an obstacle is identified, ENav immediately reroutes the rover around it, providing Perseverance’s six wheels with instructions on how to navigate around the hazard.
“More than 90% of Perseverance’s journey has relied on autonomous driving, making it possible to quickly collect a diverse range of samples,” said Hiro Ono, an autonomy researcher at JPL.
Perseverance‘s team at JPL plans each day of the rover’s mission and the activities it expects the rover to perform. However, after these daily plans are sent to the rover, it completes the drive entirely on its own. ENav enables Perseverance to complete this drive safely and respond to unexpected surface hazards such as sand pits, rocks, and ledges. As part of its algorithm, ENav evaluates each of the rover’s six wheels against terrain elevation, determines the trade-offs of different routes around obstacles, and ensures that the rover stays out of “keep out” areas drawn by JPL teams before a drive.
“As humans go to the Moon and even Mars in the future, long-range autonomous driving will become more critical to exploring these worlds,” Ono said.
ENav is particularly useful during drives through hazardous regions, like the “Margin Unit” — a geologic area located at the inner edge, or margin, of Jezero Crater. Perseverance climbed around 400 m of the Margin Unit from September 2023 to November 2024, collecting three surface samples and studying countless rocks for signs of ancient life. JPL scientists believe that the Margin Unit samples may show how rocks from deep within Mars interacted with surface water and the planet’s atmosphere — possibly creating conditions that could’ve supported life.
Perseverance has been particularly studying rocks with olivine — a mineral formed at high temperatures deep within a planet, offering those who study it a brief look into the planet’s interior when it formed. After analyzing the olivine identified at the Margin Unit, Perseverance scientists believe it formed when magma intruded into underground layers and cooled into igneous rock, a process known in geology as “intrusion.” Erosion at the Martian surface then exposed the igneous rock to flowing water within Jezero and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These interactions formed carbonates and olivine.
“This combination of olivine and carbonate was a major factor in the choice to land at Jezero Crater. These minerals are powerful recorders of planetary evolution and the potential for life,” said Perseverance scientist Ken Williford, who led the study that analyzed the rover’s findings at the Margin Unit.
Annotated image showing olivine on the “Cheyava Falls” rock discovered by Perseverance in 2024. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Olivine and carbonates are great at preserving signs of ancient life and atmospheric evolution. At the base of the Margin Unit, where any rocks would have been submerged under Jezero Crater’s ancient lake, Perseverance found olivine that appeared to have been altered by flowing water. However, as the rover climbed up the Margin Unit, it found olivine with magma chambers and crystallization rather than signs of water alteration.
Once Perseverance arrives at Lac de Charmes, it is expected to find more olivine and carbonates, which scientists will analyze for signs of ancient life. Furthermore, the minerals found there will be compared more closely to those studied at the Margin Unit.
Quelle: NSF
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Update: 1.02.2026
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NASA’s Perseverance Rover Completes First AI-Planned Drive on Mars
The team for the six-wheeled scientist used a vision-capable AI to create a safe route over the Red Planet’s surface without the input of human route planners.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has completed the first drives on another world that were planned by artificial intelligence. Executed on Dec. 8 and 10, and led by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the demonstration used generative AI to create waypoints for Perseverance, a complex decision-making task typically performed manually by the mission’s human rover planners.
“This demonstration shows how far our capabilities have advanced and broadens how we will explore other worlds,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Autonomous technologies like this can help missions to operate more efficiently, respond to challenging terrain, and increase science return as distance from Earth grows. It’s a strong example of teams applying new technology carefully and responsibly in real operations.”
During the demonstration, the team leveraged a type of generative AI called vision-language models to analyze existing data from JPL’s surface mission dataset. The AI used the same imagery and data that human planners rely on to generate waypoints — fixed locations where the rover takes up a new set of instructions — so that Perseverance could safely navigate the challenging Martian terrain.
The initiative was led out of JPL’s Rover Operations Center (ROC) in collaboration with Anthropic, using the company’s Claude AI models.
This annotated orbital image depicts the AI-planned (depicted in magenta) and actual (orange) routes the Perseverance Mars rover took during its Dec. 10, 2025, drive at Jezero Crater. The drive was the second of two demonstrations showing that generative AI could be incorporated into rover route planning.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UofA
Progress for Mars, beyond
Mars is on average about 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away from Earth. This vast distance creates a significant communication lag, making real-time remote operation — or “joy-sticking” — of a rover impossible. Instead, for the past 28 years, over several missions, rover routes have been planned and executed by human “drivers,” who analyze the terrain and status data to sketch a route using waypoints, which are usually spaced no more than 330 feet (100 meters) apart to avoid any potential hazards. Then they send the plans via NASA’s Deep Space Network to the rover, which executes them.
But for Perseverance’s drives on the 1,707 and 1,709 Martian days, or sols, of the mission, the team did something different: Generative AI provided the analysis of the high-resolution orbital imagery from the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and terrain-slope data from digital elevation models. After identifying critical terrain features — bedrock, outcrops, hazardous boulder fields, sand ripples, and the like — it generated a continuous path complete with waypoints.
To ensure the AI’s instructions were fully compatible with the rover’s flight software, the engineering team also processed the drive commands through JPL’s “digital twin” (virtual replica of the rover), verifying over 500,000 telemetry variables before sending commands to Mars.
On Dec. 8, with generative AI waypoints in its memory, Perseverance drove 689 feet (210 meters). Two days later, it drove 807 feet (246 meters).
“The fundamental elements of generative AI are showing a lot of promise in streamlining the pillars of autonomous navigation for off-planet driving: perception (seeing the rocks and ripples), localization (knowing where we are), and planning and control (deciding and executing the safest path),” said Vandi Verma, a space roboticist at JPL and a member of the Perseverance engineering team. “We are moving towards a day where generative AI and other smart tools will help our surface rovers handle kilometer-scale drives while minimizing operator workload, and flag interesting surface features for our science team by scouring huge volumes of rover images.”
“Imagine intelligent systems not only on the ground at Earth, but also in edge applications in our rovers, helicopters, drones, and other surface elements trained with the collective wisdom of our NASA engineers, scientists, and astronauts,” said Matt Wallace, manager of JPL’s Exploration Systems Office. “That is the game-changing technology we need to establish the infrastructure and systems required for a permanent human presence on the Moon and take the U.S. to Mars and beyond."
Quelle: NASA
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Update: 4.02.2026
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Bleached Martian rocks offer fresh evidence of a wetter and warmer Mars: 'But where did they come from?
"You need so much water that we think these could be evidence of an ancient warmer and wetter climate where there was rain falling for millions of years."
Bleached, clay-rich rocks spotted by NASA's Perseverance rover offer fresh evidence that Mars may have had rain and a warmer, wetter climate billions of years ago. (Image credit: NASA)
NASA's Perseverance rover has discovered thousands of strangely bleached rocks on Mars that are rich in a mineral difficult to form without long-term exposure to water, adding fresh evidence that the Red Planet was warmer, wetter and possibly rain-soaked billions of years ago.
The newfound Mars rocks are rich in kaolinite, a soft, white, clay mineral that, on Earth, typically forms when water slowly leaches other elements from rock over thousands to millions of years, a new study reports. On Earth, it is most commonly found in warm, humid environments such as rainforests, where frequent rainfall drives intense chemical weathering.
"All life uses water," Adrian Broz, a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University who led the new study, said in a statement. "So when we think about the possibility of these rocks on Mars representing a rainfall-driven environment, that is a really incredible, habitable place where life could have thrived if it were ever on Mars."
"You need so much water that we think these could be evidence of an ancient warmer and wetter climate where there was rain falling for millions of years," added study co-author Briony Horgan, who is a professor of planetary science in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at Purdue University and a long-term planner on the Perseverance mission.
Perseverance identified several thousand of these kaolinite-rich rocks — ranging from small pebbles to large boulders — scattered across the surface of Jezero crater, the dry, bowl-shaped depression just north of Mars' equator that likely held a lake billions of years ago.
Since landing on Mars in 2021, the car-sized robot has explored the crater floor searching for evidence of past microbial life. Late last year, it climbed up the crater's inner wall and onto the rim, exploring new terrain. Scientists are trying to understand how that wetter era ended, when Mars lost its global magnetic field and particles from the sun began stripping away its thick atmosphere, transforming the planet into the cold, barren world seen today.
While kaolinite-bearing terrains on Mars had previously been identified from orbit, Perseverance's discoveries allow scientists to study such materials directly on the planet's surface, the study notes.
To better understand how the Martian rocks formed, Broz and his team compared Perseverance data with kaolinite deposits on Earth, including published data from Southern California and South Africa. The chemical signatures closely matched, strengthening the case that the Martian rocks formed through rainfall-driven weathering rather than volcanic or hydrothermal processes, according to the new study.
One lingering mystery the team is still trying to solve is where the rocks came from.
There is no obvious nearby bedrock source, according to the study. The closest potential origin lies about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) away, where orbital data shows signatures consistent with kaolinite in large chunks of fractured rock created by ancient impacts. Researchers also point to areas along the stretches of Neretva Vallis, a river channel that once flowed into Jezero crater.
"They're clearly recording an incredible water event, but where did they come from?" Horgan said in the statement. The rocks may have been carried into the crater by ancient rivers or blasted there by meteorite impacts, he added. "We're not totally sure."
These findings are described in a paper published in December of 2025 in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment.
Quelle: SC