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May 17, 2022 | Contact Eric Rolfsen for more information
Covered in the red dust that sealed his fate, NASA’s InSight lander is slowly shutting down, more than 250 million kilometers from home.
With its solar panels, which are now obscured by the debris of the red planet, the four-year-old robot is running out of power. One by one, his instruments are being taken offline: his robotic arm is moving into a “retirement position”, the seismometer will probably be turned off sometime in June.
Dr. Catherine Johnson (she), a co-researcher on the InSight research team and a professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, discusses what the team has found, what questions remain to be answered and what will happen to the small landing gear. which can.
Dr. Catherine Johnson
What was the mission of the device and what did it find?
It was the first space robot to study the interior of Mars in depth: its crust, mantle and core. Launched in 2018, it made measurements of Earth’s motion (seismic data), weather (temperature, wind, pressure and even magnetic field) and accurately measured the planet’s rotation, all to help us understand how they formed rocky planets in our solar system. Unlike many other robots on Mars, InSight was a stationary lander, as the seismometer had to stay in place to measure very small movements of the earth resulting from “earthquakes”.
We learned so much about the issues we decided to look at, such as understanding the thickness of Mars’ crust, how large its metal core is, the internal structure of the planet, when and where earthquakes occur, and how large they are.
I worked on data from the magnetometer. We learned how magnetized the rocks below the landing site are and that there are time variations in the planet’s magnetic field, probably related to magnetic fields generated by electric currents in the atmosphere or above by solar winds. We know, for example, that like the Earth, there are variations in the magnetic field from day to night.
NASA’s InSight spacecraft captured this panorama from the landing site on December 9, 2018, the 14th Martian day, or salt, from its mission. The 290-degree perspective explores the edge of the degraded crater in which InSight, called Homestead Hollow, landed. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Is the landing gear really dead or just sleeping?
The InSight lander will be asleep and may wake up in the future. The tools will be turned off and he will enter a mode in which he is no longer even awake, so that we can talk to him routinely. But the operations team can put the software in place, so if it regains its power, say, by clearing the solar panels of a strong gust of wind, there will be a way to communicate with it or the lander can send us a message.
I will be sad when it turns off. You are very attached to your robots. Anyone who has watched Roomba walk around the living room understands that you can become attached to a robot! And when you become part of something that’s really hard to do, and you make observations that are first in some way, there’s a certain attachment.
The most difficult thing in some respects is that all the tools that have worked are still working, they just don’t have enough power to maintain them. It would be great to use these tools that work so well to make observations over many years.
One of InSight’s 2.2-meter solar panels was pictured by the landing gear’s deployment camera, which is fixed to the elbow of his robotic arm. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
What mysteries does Mars still offer?
We have seen that earthquakes appear to be seasonal and we do not know why. We were able to get data for nearly two years on Mars (Mars is about two Earth years each year), so we know it’s not just a coincidence – we can see this pattern repeat itself, with more tremors at certain times of the Martian year. . Why earthquakes happen this way is still one of the biggest mysteries for us.
NASA’s InSight lander uses an instrument deployment camera (IDC) at the end of its robotic arm to capture this sunset on Mars on April 25, 2019, the 145th Martian day or salt from the mission. This was done around 6:30 pm Mars local time. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
We also noticed that there are fluctuations in the magnetic field that are minutes or even shorter. Some of them look like small waves in the magnetic field and we do not know why they happen – is there a seasonal dependence in their appearance, they are all the result of the same reason?
We hope that another mission will land elsewhere on Mars with the same equipment as InSight, so that we can continue to explore the mysteries of the interior of Mars.
Interview language (s): English (Johnson)
Suggested images and video: www.bit.ly/Insightlander
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