While NASA’s Perseverance rover is still chugging along, the InSight Mars lander may have just sent its final Tweet after months of low power due to dust covering its solar panels. Fortunately, its time on the Red Planet has been both productive and serene, so unless a gust of wind suddenly clears off the pair of 7-foot solar panels, it will be the last we hear from this probe.
It successfully landed at Elysium Planitia on November 26, 2018 and was active on Mars for 1440 sols (1480 days; 4 years, 19 days). NASA’s main objectives for this robotic lander objectives were to place a Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) on the Martian surface to measure seismic activity and provide accurate 3D models of the planet’s interior. This data provides new understanding of how the Solar System’s terrestrial planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars – and Earth’s Moon formed and are continuing to evolve.
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We’ve been hoping for a dust cleaning like we saw happen several times to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. That’s still possible, but energy is low enough that our focus is making the most of the science we can still collect,” said Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
