Zoom In / Planetarium Paul Byrne created this compilation of NASA images showing the InSight spacecraft on its 10th day on Mars and the lander 1201 days later.
Paul Byrne / Twitter / NASA
Anyone planning to move to Mars should probably consider dust. Lots of dust.
Earlier this month, NASA announced that it would soon have to suspend scientific operations on its Mars InSight lander due to declining power levels from the vehicle’s dust-covered solar panels. The spacecraft that landed on the red planet in November 2018 to study seismic activity simply cannot produce enough power to operate normally.
InSight has detected more than 1,300 earthquakes, NASA scientists say, including a relatively powerful magnitude 5 earthquake on May 4. This is the largest earthquake ever discovered, and at the upper limit of what scientists had hoped to observe. This seismic activity allowed scientists to reveal details about the internal structure of the red planet.
But scientists say they expect InSight to become fully operational by December this year, so they plan to end the vehicle’s scientific operations this summer. This is because InSight solar panels, which produce 5,000 watts of energy each day after landing, can now generate only about 500 watts. And the amount of daily power continues to decline due to the accumulation of dust on solar panels over the past three and a half years.
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For some NASA missions to Mars, passing whirlwinds have helped clear dust from the spacecraft’s solar panels, as has happened with Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Unfortunately, this did not happen for the seismic lander.
The first step to shutting down InSight involves placing the robotic arm of the spacecraft in the stowed position. Initially, this arm was used to deploy the InSight seismometer, and later for several tasks, including removing dust from InSight solar panels. But now there is simply not enough power to move regularly, and scientists want to keep what’s left to control the seismometer a little more.
Before retrieving, however, the robotic arm took one last InSight selfie, and the dramatic result shows how dusty the spacecraft has become. The entire InSight is now covered in cold, dry, reddish powder.
The deaths of spaceships in distant worlds are always melancholic. Mankind sends these metal machines into a hostile environment where they struggle to survive and provide us with new knowledge of the unknown. Eventually, they succumb to cold, radiation or dust, and we can no longer communicate with them.
But InSight was a good spacecraft that outlived its design life by two years and created a bonanza of science, including the discovery that the core of Mars is much smaller than expected.
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