NASA’s Mars rover InSight took pictures of himself and sent them back to Earth in April of this year. Red dust is piled up all over the solar panels. Courtesy of NASA
NASA’s unmanned probe Insight, which has been active on Mars, such as detecting 1,300 Martian earthquakes, retired after four years.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announced on the 21st (local time) that InSight was ending its Mars exploration mission, saying that the last signal was lost on December 15th. JPL said, “The solar panels mounted on the InSight seem to have been turned off due to dust accumulation.”
InSight was launched in May 2018 to reveal the secrets of the birth of Mars and the process of evolution of the solar system. . It was originally designed to perform a two-year mission, but has been operating with two mission extensions.
“I watched InSight launch and land on Mars,” said Thomas Zuberchen, NASA deputy director of science.
InSight has observed more than 1,319 earthquakes on Mars over the past four years, including a magnitude 5 earthquake detected in May. In particular, as a result of analyzing the earthquake data sent by Insight, it was revealed that a meteorite impacted Mars in December of last year, resulting in a magnitude 4 earthquake and a 150-meter-sized crater.
Earthquakes are important information about the characteristics of the mantle and core of Mars and its crust. Raphael Garcia, a professor at the University of Toulouse in France, who published the analysis of four seismic waves generated by meteorite impacts on Mars by Insight in September of this year, said, “Meteorite impacts are the clock of the solar system. there is,” he said.
However, not all missions have been successful with Insight. InSight tried to explore the underground by digging up to 5m into the soil of Mars, but no matter how much the drill worked, the hole in the soil did not work, so it only excavated 30cm. The cause of the failure is not known in detail, but it is assumed that the soil was soft like sand or mud.
Meanwhile, it’s the second time NASA’s Mars rover has ended its mission due to dust. The Mars rover Opportunity, which landed on Mars in 2004, went into hibernation due to a dust storm in May 2018 and ended its mission.