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NASA Starts Countdown to End of InSight Mars Mission


NASA’s InSight spacecraft not fully dead yet.

But InSight, a stationary robotic probe on Mars, is getting weaker as dust builds up on its solar panels. Mission managers predict it won’t have enough energy to keep its vehicles running by the end of summer and will be quiet until the end of the year.

“It’s just a lack of energy,” Kathya Zamora Garcia, the mission’s deputy project scientist, told a news conference Tuesday.

The spacecraft might be in luck if a dust devil, a miniature tornado swirling across the Martian landscape, passes by and blows the dust off the solar panels. Although several thousand dust devils have been spotted in the area, none of them have helpfully cleared InSight.

“As it’s been three and a half years and we haven’t seen one yet, we’re not very hopeful, but it could still happen,” said Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator.

When InSight landed in November 2018, pristine solar panels produced 5,000 watt-hours of energy each Martian day. Now, in the powder, they produce a tenth of it.

The spacecraft fulfilled its main objectives during its primary two-year mission; NASA later approved a two-year extension until the end of 2022.

As the energy dwindles, administrators will begin to shut down the spacecraft’s instruments and deploy its mechanical arm. They will try to keep the craft’s main scientific instrument, a precision seismometer, running for as long as possible, but within a few weeks they will start to run it only part of the day, maybe even every other day, instead of constantly. .

Ms. Garcia said the seismometer should probably be completely shut down in July. After that, there will be enough energy to control radio communications and maybe take an occasional photo.

When InSight loses power, it will join a series of NASA missions, including two Viking landers that landed in 1976, stranded on the red planet after long and successful runs. Spirit and Opportunity rovers arriving in 2004 for 90-day missions but it took years. NASA is still two other rovers and an experimental helicopter to study the surface of Mars and China has a rover in operation there.

Most of NASA’s missions to Mars over the past two decades have focused on the possibility that the fourth planet from the sun might once have been hospitable to life.

InSight – the name is a compression of the mission’s full name, Internal Exploration Using Seismic Surveys, Geodesy and Heat Transfer – was instead a diversion focused on the deep inner mysteries of Mars. The $830 million mission aimed to answer questions about the planet’s structure, composition and geological history.

Mars lacks plate tectonics, which is the sliding of pieces of crust that shape our planet’s surface. However, mars earthquakes still occur, driven by other tectonic stresses such as the cooling of the crust and its contraction and cracking.

InSight recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes during its mission. Just two weeks ago, it observed the largest marshal ever: at magnitude 5.0, modest by Earth standards but on the high end of what scientists expected for Mars.

Dr. The epicenter of the 5.0-magnitude earthquake was located near a series of rifts known as the Cerberus Fossae, where many previously detected marsquats have occurred, Banerdt said. However, “The interesting thing is not in Cerberus Fossae. And we don’t really understand that yet.”

He said the scientists only had two weeks to analyze the data, but were able to clearly see the seismic signals, and that the quake could be big enough to start vibrating Mars like a bell, but at very low frequencies. To listen.

Dr. “This earthquake will truly be a wealth of scientific knowledge once we get into it,” Banerdt said.

By listening to the echoes of seismic waves bouncing off Mars, InSight produced data that could be transformed. three-dimensional map of the planet.

The shell turned out thinner than expected and appears to consist of three lower layers. Seismic signals also measured the size of the core: about 2,300 miles in diameter.

The seismometer revealed not only what’s below, but also the dynamics in the air above. Winds of 10 to 15 miles per hour over InSight’s solar panels caused the spacecraft to vibrate, and the spacecraft recorded vibrations that turned into sound.

The other main instrument aboard InSight, a heat probe that will shoot itself about 16 feet into Martian soil, hasn’t been fully deployed.

Nicknamed the “mole,” the tool never went more than an inch below the surface, despite two years of effort. The soil it landed on tended to clump; this was a feature different from materials encountered elsewhere on Mars. The clumping reduced the surface area of ​​the dirt pressed against the edges of the mole and was unable to pull itself down with insufficient friction.

Dr. “The specific soil under InSight turned out to be a consolidated crusty soil layer at the top when we landed,” Banerdt said. “And that crust, the earth, the mole trying to get in, it kind of fell apart.”

Before the mole took it underground, scientists were unable to obtain hoped-for measurements of heat flowing from the planet, which would reveal more precise data about today’s internal temperatures of Mars and the geological processes that drive energy.

Dr. “This is what we lost,” Banerdt said.

Even after InSight has quieted down, the possibility remains that a passing dust devil will scavenge the solar panels and the spacecraft will resurrect.

“We’ll listen,” said Miss Garcia. “And when we get a few beeps, if that happens again, if there’s a natural cleanup, then we’ll assess whether there’s enough energy to get the lander to start again.”



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