The US space agency “NASA” announced that it had lost contact with its “Insight” probe located on the surface of Mars, after four years spent exploring the red planet.
“Farewell to a spacecraft is always sad, but Insight’s amazing scientific results are cause for joy,” NASA Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuken said in a statement.
Equipped with a French-made ultra-sensitive seismometer, InSight recorded more than 1,300 “shakes on Mars”, some of which were caused by meteorites.
A year ago, a meteorite fell so powerful that it caused ice blocks to scatter on the surface of Mars.
The end of this mission was expected, as the remaining energy of the probe became low due to the Martian dust accumulated on its solar panels, which was what NASA expected from the beginning.
NASA received the last notification from “Insight” on December 15, and until the 18th of the same month, the US agency tried to contact it twice, but to no avail, prompting the teams to conclude that the probe’s batteries were dead.
NASA confirmed in a statement that it is continuing to try to capture any notification, but that this possibility is “unlikely.”
The “Insight” probe landed on the surface of Mars in 2018, and it was operating in cooperation with the National Center for Space Studies in France.
However, the mission failed to achieve one of its objectives, which is to plant an instrument at a depth of a few meters below the surface of Mars to measure the temperature of this planet, but the soil composition at the landing site prevented the instrument from being planted as expected.
And after it was installed at a depth of about 40 centimeters, the tool was able to provide “valuable data on the physical and thermal properties of the Martian soil,” according to NASA.