The InSight lander’s mission officially came to an end last week “after making groundbreaking discoveries about the mysterious interior of the red planet.”
The managers of the mission reportedly declared the program’s end “after the lander failed to respond to two messages from mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.”
The stationary lander, which collected the most comprehensive weather data of any mission sent to the surface of Mars, according to NASA, landed on Mars on November 26, 2018 and spent close to1,500 days there.
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“While saying goodbye to a spacecraft is always sad, the fascinating science InSight conducted is cause for celebration. The seismic data alone from this Discovery Program mission offers tremendous insights not just into Mars but other rocky bodies, including Earth,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
“Designed to last for only two years, InSight’s mission was extended twice. But a heavy accumulation of dust on its solar panels caused a steady drop in the lander’s power source,” reports.
The lander’s incredibly sensitive seismometer, called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, could detect marsquakes from hundreds and thousands of miles away, as per Ashley.
Instructively, in May, “InSight captured “the big one,” a marsquake with a magnitude of 5, which sent vibrations through the planet for at least six hours.”
Additionally, InSight “heard space rocks as they slammed into Mars and left behind fresh, gaping craters. One revealed a treasure trove of buried ice near the warm Martian equator.”
Bruce Banerdt, the mission’s principal investigator said: “We’ve thought of InSight as our friend and colleague on Mars for the past four years, so it’s hard to say goodbye…But it has earned its richly deserved retirement.”
