As InSight Mars rover's life ends, the work begins
Since landing on Mars in late 2018, NASA's InSight Mars lander has paved the way for groundbreaking discoveries that will be studied for decades, according to a team of researchers heading the interplanetary expedition. But the rover is gradually losing power, forcing scientists to prepare for the sunset of their mission sometime this summer.
Using an advanced suite of instruments attached to InSight — short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — NASA Jet Propulsion Lab leaders have spent the last year on Mars, equivalent to two Earth years, exploring the planet's interior and geological activity to learn more about the formation and evolution of the red planet.
By December of this year, however, InSight is expected to have witnessed the last of the more than 1,300 marsquakes — the name for earthquakes on Mars — that have been detected during its 1,200 days on Martian soil.
Thankfully, Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., explained Tuesday, the data already collected allows researchers to accurately measure Mars' weather patterns, the composition of its planetary structure and remnants of the planet's ancient magnetic field.
“The InSight mission has really just been an incredible mission for us and it's given us a glimpse of Mars that we couldn't get from any other spacecraft in our NASA Mars fleet,” Glaze said during a call with her peers, media and viewers from around the globe. “And it's not just telling us information about Mars, but broadening our planetary science understanding and helping us think differently about other rocky planets across the solar system and beyond.”
This month, a magnitude 5 marsquake rocked the InSight rover's seismometer, marking the largest quake observed on another planet and highlighting the Red Planet still has much to show the team of observers.
Unfortunately, the large quake comes as Mars enters winter, a time when there's more dust in the air and reduced hours of available sunlight, according to researchers, which poses a problem for two 7-feet wide solar panels that are tasked with powering the rover.
When InSight first landed on Martian soil, the rover had the ability to power a conventional home oven for 100 minutes, InSight deputy project manager Kathya Zamora Garcia said Tuesday.
“Nowadays, we could probably run that approximately 10 minutes max,” Zamora Garcia said. “So that'll give you a good understanding of how much energy has decreased.”
Thanks to a collective of minds at JPL, however, team leaders have repeatedly found ways to lift the weight of the Martian world off of the solar panels by using a robotic arm to tilt the device, allowing the seismometer to continue making inaugural discoveries.
Having worked to land a rover on Mars for more than a decade, InSight's Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt said he feels a personal connection to the rover he shares a birthday with.
And though he hasn't had much time to reflect on the journey in space since finding creative solutions to address the power problem is a full-time job, Banerdt assured people he is proud of the legacy InSight is leaving.
“InSight is the first mission that's shone a light inside of Mars and shown us what the rest of the Mars looks like,” Banerdt said.