Saturday 28 / December / 2024
Washington: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), on Wednesday retired its Mars InSight lander, 4 years after it arrived on the surface of the red planet.
Taking to Twitter, NASA shared a post and wrote, "After more than four years, 1,300 marsquakes, and countless scientific discoveries, our @NASAInSight lander has reached the end of its mission. InSight may be retiring, but its legacy--and its findings from the deep interior of Mars--will live on."
According to a NASA press release, mission controllers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California were unable to contact the lander after two consecutive attempts, leading them to conclude the spacecraft's solar-powered batteries have run out of energy - a state engineers refer to as 'dead bus'.
InSight mission touched down on the red planet on November 27, 2018, after seven months of travelling through space.
NASA had previously decided to declare the mission over if the lander missed two communication attempts. The agency will continue to listen for a signal from the lander, just in case, but hearing from it at this point is considered unlikely. The last time InSight communicated with Earth was December 15, as per the press release issued by the agency.
The Associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, Thomas Zurbuchen, said, "I watched the launch and landing of this mission, and 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."
InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is the first outer space robotic explorer and will study the crust, mantle, and core of the fourth planet in our solar system.
The lander was launched on May 5, 2018, from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and took a six-month cruise from Earth to Mars ever since, is NASA's first spacecraft to land on Mars since Curiosity.
Its highly sensitive seismometer, along with daily monitoring performed by the French space agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and the Marsquake Service managed by ETH Zurich, detected 1,319 marsquakes, including quakes caused by meteoroid impacts, the largest of which unearthed boulder-size chunks of ice late last year. Such impacts helped scientists to determine the age of the planet's surface, and data from the seismometer provided scientists a way to study the planet's crust, mantle and core, according to NASA.
The director of JPL, which managed the mission, Laurie Leshin, said, "InSight has more than lived up to its name. As a scientist who's spent a career studying Mars, it's been a thrill to see what the lander has achieved, thanks to an entire team of people across the globe who helped make this mission a success. Yes, it's sad to say goodbye, but InSight's legacy will live on, informing and inspiring."
