NASA decommissions Mars InSight spacecraft
2022.12.22 13:10
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NASA decommissions Mars InSight spacecraft
Budrigannews.com – The Mars InSight lander, the first robotic probe specifically designed to study the deep interior of a distant world, has been officially retired by NASA on Wednesday, four years after it arrived on the surface of the red planet.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory mission controllers (NYSE:) When two attempts to reestablish radio contact with the lander failed in succession, JPL) near Los Angeles determined that the mission had ended. This indicated that InSight’s solar-powered batteries had run out of power.
At the end of October, NASA said that the spacecraft would run out of power in a few weeks because dust was getting heavier and heavier on its solar panels, making it hard for the batteries to charge.
JPL engineers will keep looking for a signal from the lander just in case, but NASA said it’s unlikely they’ll hear from InSight again. On December 15, the stationary three-legged probe last communicated with Earth.
InSight’s original two-year mission was later extended to four years after it landed on Mars in late November 2018 with instruments designed to detect planetary seismic rumblings that had never been measured anywhere other than Earth.
The lander has assisted researchers in gaining a new understanding of the internal structure of Mars from its perch in a vast, relatively flat plain known as Elysium Planitia, just north of the planet’s equator.
According to the researchers, the data from InSight revealed the structure of the mantle that lies between the outer crust and inner core, as well as the size and density of the inner core.
One of Understanding’s main achievements was laying out that the red planet is, for sure, seismically dynamic, recording more than 1,300 marsquakes. Additionally, it measured meteorite impacts’ seismic waves.
Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, stated, “The seismic data alone from this discovery program mission offers tremendous insights not just into Mars but other rocky bodies, including Earth.”
A year ago, it was discovered that a similar impact had gouged boulder-sized pieces of water ice surprisingly close to Mars’ equator.
NASA’s science rover Perseverance, a more recent robotic visitor to the red planet, continues to prepare a collection of Martian mineral samples for future analysis on Earth even as InSight retires.
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According to NASA, Perseverance deposited the first of 10 sample tubes it was instructed to leave at a surface collection site on Mars this week as a backup cache in the event that the primary supply stored in the rover’s belly cannot be transferred to a retrieval spacecraft as planned in the future.
