The US Aeronautics and Space Administration “NASA” announced today, Wednesday, that the “Insight” lander, designed to understand the geological life of Mars, has completed its mission on the Red Planet, four years after its launch.
The spacecraft relied on solar energy, but amounts of dust had accumulated on the solar panels, and were no longer able to provide enough energy to operate the probe.
Predictable fate
The probe’s outage was not a surprise, as the Insight team had been expecting this to happen for months. Last October, “NASA” announced that the “Insight” vehicle, which has been on the surface of Mars since 2018, will run out of energy and stop working within four to eight weeks, while scientists talked about the details of its observations in its four-year mission.
The InSight mission, which helped reveal the internal structure and seismic activity of Mars, was scheduled to last two years, but has been extended to four.
Scientists last heard a message from the robot on December 15.
“We’ve actually been able to do more than we claimed and promised to do,” said Bruce Banerdt, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the principal investigator for the InSight mission, describing the mission as very successful.
Four years into the Insight mission.
Insight launched in May 2018, landed six months later and lasted for four years. The $814 million robot quietly listened to the sound of the Red Planet.
InSight is designed to look deep into the planet, measuring layers from the surface all the way to the molten core. The mission was also intended to track current geological activity by feeling earthquakes.
Mars posed a challenge to the “Insight” vehicle, nicknamed “Mole”, as the device was supposed to dig itself at a depth of 5 meters and measure the amount of heat rising from the Martian core, but it could not do so because the land below it is different from the sites explored by NASA’s rovers. Previously, according to Sue Smrekar, a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and deputy principal investigator at InSight.
Perseverance vehicle
Meanwhile, the Perseverance spacecraft is on the surface of the Red Planet, searching for signs of life on the planet.
And the huge vehicle landed in February 2021 on Mars in the Jezero crater, which scientists believe contained a lake 3.5 billion years ago, which is considered the most dangerous landing site ever because of its topography.
Perseverance sends images of the planet continuously, and searches for samples to study, in an effort to discover traces of ancient microorganisms that are likely to have been on the planet three billion years ago. NASA intends to continue operating the spacecraft until January 2023.