It could be the end of the red dusty line for NASA’s InSight lander, which fell silent after four years on Mars as the lander’s power levels have been dwindling for months due to all the dust coating its solar panels
The lander's other main instrument, however, encountered nothing but trouble.
A German digging device — meant to measure the temperature of Mars' interior — never made it deeper than a couple feet , well short of the intended 16 feet . NASA declared it dead nearly two years ago.“My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send,” the team wrote on InSight's behalf. “Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will — but I’ll be signing off here soon.
NASA still has two active rovers on Mars: Curiosity, roaming the surface since 2012, and Perseverance, which arrived early last year. Perseverance is in the midst of creating a sample depot; the plan is to leave 10 tubes of rock cores on the Martian surface as a backup to samples on the rover itself. NASA plans to bring some of these samples back to Earth in a decade, in its longtime search for signs of ancient microscopic life on Mars.
Perseverance also has a companion: a mini helicopter named Ingenuity. It just completed its 37th flight and has now logged more than an hour of Martian flight time.The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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