NASA’s marsquake mission nearing end because of dust
InSight spacecraft is not quite dead yet.
But InSight, a stationary robotic probe on Mars which currently detects marsquakes, has been steadily growing weaker as dust accumulates on its solar panels. Mission managers predict that by late summer it will not have enough energy to continue operating its instruments and that by the end of the year it will fall silent.
“That’s just due to the lack of energy,” Kathya Zamora Garcia, the mission’s deputy project scientist, said during a news conference Tuesday.
The spacecraft could prove lucky if a dust devil — a miniature whirlwind swirling along the Martian landscape — passes over and blows the dust off the solar panels. Although several thousand dust devils have been detected in the area, none has helpfully cleaned InSight.
When InSight landed in November 2018, its pristine solar panels generated 5,000 watthours of energy each Martian day. Now, enshrouded in dust, they are producing one-tenth as much.
The spacecraft fulfilled its main objectives during its two-year primary mission; NASA then approved a two-year extension through the end of 2022.
As the energy dwindles, the managers will begin to shut down the spacecraft’s instruments and stow its mechanical arm. They will try to keep the craft’s main scientific tool, a sensitive seismometer, running as long as possible, although in a couple of weeks they will start to run it for only part of the day, or maybe even every other day, instead of continuously.
Garcia said the seismometer would probably have to be shut off entirely in July. After that, there will be just enough energy to check in with radio communications and perhaps snap an occasional photograph.
Most of NASA’s missions to Mars over the past two decades have focused on the possibility that the sun’s fourth planet may have once been hospitable for life.
InSight — the name is a compression of the mission’s full name, Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, GeodNASA’s esy and Heat Transport — was a diversion, focusing instead on the mysteries of Mars’ deep interior. The $830 million mission aimed to answer questions about the planet’s structure, composition and geological history.
Mars lacks plate tectonics, the sliding of pieces of the crust that shapes the surface of our planet. But marsquakes occur nonetheless, driven by other tectonic stresses like the shrinking and cracking of the crust as it cools.
During its mission, InSight recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes. Just two weeks ago, it observed the largest marsquake so far: a magnitude of 5.0, modest by Earth standards but at the high end of what scientists expected for Mars. The epicenter of the magnitude-5.0 quake was located near a series of fissures known as Cerberus Fossae, where many marsquakes detected earlier had occurred, Banerdt said. But, he added, “It’s not actually in Cerberus Fossae, which is interesting. And we don’t really understand that yet.”
By listening to the echoes of the seismic waves bouncing around inside Mars, InSight produced data that could be turned into a 3-D map of the planet.