The US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said on Thursday that the InSight rover, which has been on the surface of Mars since 2018, will run out of power and stop working within four to eight weeks, while scientists talked about details of its observations in its four-year mission. .
Bruce Banerdt, a planetary physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the principal investigator for the Insight mission, told a news briefing that dust was accumulating on the solar panels that bring power to the spacecraft and that the situation was exacerbated by a dust storm, which was depleting its batteries.
The InSight mission, which helped reveal the interior structure and seismic activity of Mars, was scheduled to last two years but has been extended to four. When the power runs out, Bannerdt said, NASA will lose contact with the spacecraft.
“Insight has been more successful than I expected,” he told Reuters. “We have determined the thickness of the crust, the size and density of the inner core, and the details of the structure of the outer surface. For the first time, we have a comprehensive detailed map of the deep interior of a planet other than Earth and the Moon.”
Insight also revealed that Mars is seismically active, with 1,318 tremors recorded.
Two papers published in the journal Science detail the meteorite strikes on Mars that Insight discovered in September and December of last year. The seismic waves from the strikes revealed new details about the structure of Mars’ crust and the planet’s outer layer.
Among the objects of particular interest was a space rock between five and 12 meters in diameter that crashed last December 24 in an area called Amazonis Planetia, where it carved a hole 150 meters wide and 21 meters deep.
Similar massive bodies enter the Earth’s atmosphere about once a year but generally burn up in the thicker atmosphere of our planet.