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After mapping the interior of Mars, NASA’s InSight mission ends this year


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This is NASA InSight’s second full selfie on Mars. Since its first selfie, the lander has removed the thermal probe and seismometer from its deck, placing them on the Martian surface; A thin layer of dust now also covers the spacecraft.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

NASA’s InSight Mars lander will end its science mission this summer and will be completely decommissioned later this year after a power outage, NASA said on Tuesday. While the mission is over, the lander’s legacy is only forming, as scientists study the “unprecedented” data Insight has gathered about Mars’ deep interior, as well as weather and from its field.

“Before InSight, the interior of Mars was a giant question mark,” said Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We just got a really fuzzy picture of what’s going on inside Mars. Now we can really paint a precise quantitative picture.”

And while InSight will slowly shut down this year during a power outage, it is still collecting valuable data. On May 4, InSight detected a magnitude 5 marsquake – the largest earthquake recorded by a factor of 10.

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NASA / JPL-Caltech

Thanks to all the data that InSight collects, scientists can estimate the thickness of Mars’ crust to within 10 km, as well as its core size to within 50 km.

That specific information, Banerdt explains, “allows us to go back and look at our planet formation patterns, see how planets evolve from a dust cloud orbiting the sun.”

With the new data, he said, “we were able to eliminate two-thirds of the planet-forming models out there, just by looking at the size and density of the core and the thickness of the crust.”

Since landing on Mars in November 2018, InSight – short for Internal Exploration using Seismic Investigation, Measurement, and Heat Transport – has been measuring waves traveling through the planet’s interior using seismometers . InSight also brought to Mars a probe to measure the planet’s internal temperature and heat flux. However, the instrument – nicknamed the “mole” – encountered an unexpectedly hard crust in the Martian soil, so it couldn’t descend far enough to take the expected measurements.

The problems with the mole were perhaps “the biggest frustration on the mission,” said Banerdt. Still, he says, the main goals his team first set for InSight have all accomplished. In fact, the main science goals of the mission were achieved in the first Martian year (almost two Earth years), and the lander is now on board. Extended quests.

The data collected over the past three and a half years, as well as the data InSight continues to collect, are all archived and made available to the entire scientific community. It will be worth it “for decades to come,” Banerdt said.

Why is the new quest ending now?

While InSight was still collecting data, the lander picked up a lot of dust. So dusty that its two solar panels, about 7 feet wide, are generating significantly less electricity than they originally were. At the start of its mission, InSight’s solar panels generated about 5,000 watt-hours per day on Mars, or sol – enough to power an electric oven for an hour and 40 minutes. Now they are producing about 500 watt-hours per sol – enough to power the same electric oven for just 10 minutes.

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The first full selfie of the lander, showing clean plates, was taken in December 2018; The dusty selfie (on the right) is from the pictures taken in March and April 2019.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

Additionally, seasonal changes on Mars will make it even more difficult for solar panels to produce electricity. Over the next few months, there will be more dust in the air, which reduces sunlight.

So this spring, NASA will run the seismometer continuously, and its operations will be shut down until it shuts down at the end of summer. Meanwhile, InSight’s robotic arm will soon be brought into a resting position, known as a “retirement position,” allowing it to take pictures. When InSight is at very low power, it can still take some images until it’s completely shut down later this year.



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