Mars’ dirt too much for digger

CAPE CANAVERAL: Nasa has declared the Mars digger dead after it failed to burrow deep into the red planet to take its temperature.

Scientists in Germany spent two years trying to get their heat probe, dubbed the mole, to drill into the Martian crust.

But the 41cmlong device that is part of Nasa’s InSight lander could not gain enough friction in the red dirt.

It was supposed to burrow 5m into Mars but only drilled down about 60cm.

Following one last attempt to hammer itself down at the weekend with 500 strokes, the team called it quits.

‘‘We’ve given it everything we’ve got but Mars and our heroic mole remain incompatible,’’ the German Space Agency’s Tilman Spohn, lead scientist for the experiment, said.

The mole’s design was based on Martian soil examined by previous spacecraft, but it was nothing like the clumpy dirt encountered this time.

The Curiosity rover has been roaming Mars since 2012. — AP