NASA gets ready to say goodbye to the InSight spacecraft

The historic mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Mars InSight lander to uncover the secrets of the interior of the Red Planet is about to come to an end as the lander goes silent, announced NASA on November 1.

The NASA team has taken measures to operate the spacecraft for as long as possible using the electricity that is still available as wind-blown dust on its solar panels thickens. The conclusion is anticipated to occur within the upcoming weeks.

InSight, which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport, is still being pushed to its limits by the close-knit operations team of 25 to 30 people, which is a small group in comparison to other Mars missions. 

However, they have also started the process of winding down the mission, as read on NASA’s official website.

The InSight mission’s last steps include archiving its vast amount of data and making it available to academics all over the world, which is the most crucial step. 

The lander data has revealed information about the layers of Mars’ interior, its liquid core, the remarkably changeable remnants of its mostly defunct magnetic field beneath the surface, the weather in this region of Mars, and a lot of earthquake activity.

Since the lander touched down in November 2018, more than 1,300 marsquakes have been detected by InSight’s seismometer, which was donated by France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). 

The largest of these was a magnitude 5 event. Even quakes brought on by meteor collisions were captured. Greater knowledge of how all rocky planets, including Earth and its Moon, originate can be gained by observing how the seismic waves from those quakes alter as they move through the globe. This includes a view into Mars’ innards.

“Finally, we can see Mars as a planet with layers, with different thicknesses, compositions,” said Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the mission’s principal investigator. 

“We’re starting to really tease out the details. Now it’s not just this enigma; it’s actually a living, breathing planet.”

This summer, the lander’s remaining power was so low that the team decided to shut down all of InSight’s other scientific tools in order to keep the seismometer operational. Even the fault protection system, which would normally shut down the seismometer automatically if it sensed that the lander’s power generation was dangerously low, was disabled.

Banerdt explained that NASA couldn’t afford to power the equipment continuously because it went down to less than 20% of the initial producing capacity.

When InSight fails two consecutive communication attempts with the spacecraft orbiting Mars which is a component of the Mars Relay Network, NASA will call the mission a failure. 

However, this will only happen if the lander itself is to blame, according to network manager Roy Gladden of JPL. NASA’s Deep Space Network will then continue to listen for a while, just in case.

There won’t be any heroic efforts to get in touch with InSight again. A mission-saving occurrence, such as a powerful wind gust that wipes the panels off, is possible but is regarded as unlikely.