NASA’s unmanned Mars rover ‘InSight’ stopped operating and ended its exploration mission in four years.
NASA announced on the 21st (local time) that InSight is retiring from its mission to Mars.
It has been four years since the probe landed on Mars on November 26, 2018.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., sent two messages to InSight to attempt to establish communications contact, but the probe did not respond.
As a result, NASA concluded that the solar cell energy powering InSight was insufficient and declared the end of the mission.
InSight was originally designed to operate for two years, but was operated with two mission extensions, and eventually power supply was expected to be cut off by the end of the year as Mars dust accumulated on the main body’s solar panels.
“I watched the launch of Insight and the landing on Mars,” said Thomas Zubochun, deputy director of science at NASA. “It is always sad to say goodbye to a rover.”
He evaluated his activities so far, saying, “Insight’s data provides great insights into the study of not only Mars but also other rocky bodies such as the Earth.”
Unlike previous Mars probes that searched for traces of life on Mars, InSight was designed to focus on studying the ‘inside’ of Mars, such as the structure of the crust and heat distribution on Mars.
The name Insight comes from an acronym for Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.
The seismometer installed by Insight has caught more than 1,300 ‘marsquakes’ (marsquakes) over the past 4 years, and also captured the largest volcanic eruption ever with a magnitude of 5.
Initially, it was planned to install a ‘geothermal measuring device’ (HP3) to measure the internal temperature of the planet at a depth of 5m underground, but the soil friction force was weaker than expected, so it failed to measure the underground heat as it might not penetrate less than 50cm.
This is the second time NASA has lost a probe sent to Mars to dust, following Opportunity.
Opportunity, which landed on Mars in January 2004, went into hibernation to save power when a dust storm engulfed the entire planet at the end of May 2018, but lost contact without waking up once more.
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