Insight Mars lander runs out of power
NASA’s InSight lander on Mars has shut down for the last time. The lander ran out of power as the solar cells are increasingly covered in dust and has fallen out of communication.
NASA warned at the beginning of November that the power was fading, generating an average of ~285 Wh of energy per Martian day, but the lander has now missed its communication slots. NASA will continue to listen out for signals using the Deep Spac Network.
Earlier this summer, the lander had so little remaining power that the mission turned off all of InSight’s other science instruments in order to keep the key instrument, the seismometer, running. They even turned off the fault protection system that would otherwise automatically shut down the seismometer if the system detects that the lander’s power generation is dangerously low.
“We were down to less than 20% of the original generating capacity,” said Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator for the mission at JPL in California. “That means we can’t afford to run the instruments around the clock.”
InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), was launched in 2018 alongside the five rovers on the planet to take seismic measurements.
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A recent dust storm added to the lander’s dust-covered solar panels, the team decided to turn off the seismometer altogether in order to save power. The seismometer is collecting data again after the storm but the power from the solar panels is fading.
A number of European partners, including France’s Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument to NASA, with the principal investigator at IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris).
Significant contributions for SEIS came from IPGP; the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland; Imperial College London and Oxford University in the United Kingdom; and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument, with significant contributions from the Space Research Center (CBK) of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika in Poland. Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) supplied the temperature and wind sensors, and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) supplied a passive laser retroreflector.
The most important of the final steps with the mission is storing its trove of data and making it accessible to researchers around the world. The lander data has yielded details about Mars’ interior layers, its liquid core, the surprisingly variable remnants beneath the surface of its mostly extinct magnetic field, weather on this part of Mars, and lots of quake activity.
The seismometer has detected more than 1,300 marsquakes since the lander touched down in November 2018, the largest measuring a magnitude 5. It even recorded quakes from meteoroid impacts. Observing how the seismic waves from those quakes change as they travel through the planet offers an invaluable glimpse into Mars’ interior but also provides a better understanding of how all rocky worlds, including Earth and its Moon, form.
The seismometer readings will join the only other sets of extraterrestrial seismic data, from the Apollo lunar missions and the Viking Mars missions, in NASA’s Planetary Data System. They will also go into an international archive run by the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, which houses “all the terrestrial seismic network data locations,” said JPL’s Sue Smrekar, InSight’s deputy principal investigator. “Now, we also have one on Mars.”
JPL also hosts a full size engineering model of the rover to practice how InSight would place science instruments on the Martian surface with the lander’s robotic arm, test techniques to get the lander’s heat probe into the sticky Martian soil, and develop ways to reduce noise picked up by the seismometer.
This model, called ForeSight, will be crated and placed in storage. “We’ll be packing it up with loving care,” Banerdt said. “It’s been a great tool, a great companion for us this whole mission.”
“We’ll keep making science measurements as long as we can,” said Banerdt. “We’re at Mars’ mercy. Weather on Mars is not rain and snow; weather on Mars is dust and wind.”
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