The end has come for NASA’s InSight mission, a Mars lander that for more than 4 years listened for ground shaking that illuminates the structure of the planet’s interior.
The lander last communicated with Earth on 15 December. NASA could not reach it in two follow-up attempts, leading the agency to conclude its batteries had run out of energy and its dust-covered solar panels could no longer deliver power.
“We’ve thought of InSight as our friend and colleague on Mars for the past 4 years, so it’s hard to say goodbye,” Bruce Banerdt, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “But it has earned its richly deserved retirement.” The $830 million mission relies on seismic waves from small marsquakes, which bounce around boundaries deep inside the planet before being picked up by a seismometer, one of two instruments on the lander. Researchers use differences in the arrival times of these waves to construct a picture of the planet’s interior. The team found Mars has aNot all went well.
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