Lander losing power after 4 years on the Red Planet as dust gathers over solar panels
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is preparing to say goodbye to its spacecraft designed to explore the deep interiors of Mars. Its InSight lander, which has been losing power, is expected to shut down in a few weeks.
The team handling InSight is trying to make sure the lander is operational for as long as possible. The fairly small group of 25-30 people — compared to other Mars missions — has begun taking steps to wind down the mission.
InSight is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. It is the first outer space robotic explorer to study in-depth the “inner space” of Mars: The crust, mantle and core.
Read more: Marsquakes: InSight lander shows active faults in the planet’s crust
The spacecraft was launched May 2018. Four years later, NASA announced that the lander was gradually losing power as its solar panels were gathering dust. InSight’s team expects the lander to have become inoperative by December.
The day is coming when I’ll fall silent, ending my nearly four Earth years (over two Mars years) of studying the Red Planet. As my time winds down on Mars, my team is helping make sure scientists can get the most out of everything I’ve gathered.
— NASA InSight (@NASAInSight) November 1, 2022
More: https://t.co/nujLgj7sUx pic.twitter.com/I0ZaRvFQpM
InSight’s team is looking at several tasks before it is time to say adieu, like preserving data, managing the power optimally and packing it up.
The most important of the final steps with the InSight mission is storing its trove of data and making it accessible to researchers worldwide.
The lander data has yielded details about Mars’ interior layers, its liquid core, the surprisingly variable remnants beneath the surface of its mostly extinct magnetic field, weather on this part of Mars and lots of quake activity.
InSight’s seismometer has detected more than 1,300 marsquakes since the lander touched down in November 2018, the largest measuring a magnitude five. It even recorded quakes from meteoroid impacts.
Earlier this summer, the lander had so little remaining power that the mission turned off all of InSight’s other science instruments to keep the seismometer running.
Read more: Red planet rumbles: NASA’s recordings of ‘marsquakes’ let us listen to the martian heartbeat
Only the most sensitive of the seismometer’s array of sensors were still operating. “We’re pushing it to the very end,” Liz Barrett, who leads science and instrument operations for the team at Jet Propulsion Lab, said in a statement. JPL manages InSight for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
A silent member of the team is ForeSight, the full-size engineering model of InSight in JPL’s In-Situ Instrument Laboratory. Engineers used ForeSight to practice how InSight would place science instruments on the Martian surface. ForeSight will be packed up “with loving care” as well.
NASA will declare the mission over when InSight misses two consecutive communication sessions with the spacecraft orbiting Mars. There will be no heroic measures to re-establish contact with InSight. While a mission-saving event — like a strong gust of wind that cleans the panels off — isn’t out of the question, it is considered unlikely.
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InSight's power generation continues to decline because of dust blown on the lander’s solar panels. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech.png)
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