NASA shared a recent selfie taken by the InSight Mars lander, which will soon retire as it loses power due to dusty solar panels.
The last selfie was taken on April 24 and shows the lander completely covered in dust.
“A dusty self-portrait,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which operates InSight, tweeted.
“@NASAInSight did what will probably be his last selfie on April 24,” he added.
The tweet also added a GIF that shows the first selfie of the spacecraft, taken in December 2018, and the last “where it is covered with Martian dust.”
Last week, NASA said InSight was gradually losing power and “is expected to end scientific operations later this summer.”
“By December, the InSight team expects the lander to become inoperable and complete the mission,” NASA said in a statement.
InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), which landed on Mars on November 26, 2018, was originally designed for almost two Earth years. The mission was then extended and its solar panels produced less energy as they continued to accumulate dust.
The solar panels of the spacecraft, each measuring about 2.2 meters wide, produce approximately one tenth of its landing capacity of 5,000 watts, NASA said.
In addition, there will be more dust in the air over the next few months, reducing sunlight and the energy of the landing craft. The energy is prioritized for the seismometer of the device, which will work at certain times of the day, such as at night, when the winds are light and the seismometer is easier to “hear”.
The seismometer itself is expected to be switched off by the end of the summer, completing the scientific phase of the mission.
At this point, the lander will still have enough power to operate, taking pictures from time to time and communicating with the Earth. But the team expects that around December, “power will be low enough that one day InSight will simply stop responding.”
With their latest selfie, the mission team will soon put the robotic arm of the lander in a resting position (called the “retirement position”) for the last time this month.
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