NASA’s InSight Mars Lander’s Days Are Numbered

—they emerge more often during the summer, says Raymond Arvidson, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the Mars Science Laboratory and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter teams. Over time, dust continually collected atop the flat, horizontal solar arrays, which started off near-black, but are now almost completely a dusty auburn. This has limited the lander’s power, and ultimately, its life expectancy.

In January, a particularly large, thick dust storm blocked sunlight from reaching the panels. Because of the reduced power supply, the InSight team put the lander in “safe mode,” suspending all but the essential functions needed for survival, until resuming normal operations about 12 days later. Since InSight is stuck in one place, it has almost no ability to shake off the dust by moving around.

While Martian storms can sprinkle dust on solar panels, they also come with winds that can sweep off dust, too, which benefited Spirit and Opportunity, Williams says: “They had enough dust devils nearby that actually cleaned the solar panels and allowed those missions to go a long time. InSight has not been so fortunate.”

“Dust isn’t our friend,” Arvidson agrees. “Apparently, the location of InSight doesn’t have a lot of these dust devils or high winds to blow dust off; it just accumulates.” In May 2021, the InSight team successfully tried a new dust-removal technique, using the lander’s robotic arm to trickle some grains of sand onto a solar panel—when a gust of wind carried the sand away, it swept a little dust off with it. But the trick isn’t enough to save the lander this time; last year it only brought back a few tens of watt-hours of energy.

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