After four years of research on Mars, NASA’s InSight spacecraft will likely end its activities next summer in the northern hemisphere, as the dust accumulated on its solar panels diminishes its power.
The robot will leave a legacy of data that scientists around the world will enjoy for years to come, which will help improve human understanding of the formation of the planet, NASA said in making the announcement on Wednesday.
Equipped with an ultrasensitive seismometer, the spacecraft has recorded more than 1,300 “Martian earthquakes”, including one of magnitude 5 on May 4, the strongest on record.
But around the month of July, the seismometer will go out.
Afterwards, the robot’s energy level will be topped up approximately once a day and it will be possible to continue taking pictures. At the end of 2022, the mission will be stopped altogether.
The cause is the accumulation of Martian dust on its two solar panels, about 2.2 meters each.
After arriving on Mars in November 2018, InSight will soon run out of battery, as it already runs on just a tenth of its original charge.
The probe gained an extension of its useful life approximately a year ago, when its mechanical arm was used in an unexpected way to eliminate some of the dust from the solar panels, prolonging the mission.
In this maneuver, successful six times, the arm used its own dust to clean the panels: it collected Martian earth and dropped it on the robot so that the dirt came out of the solar panels, partially cleaning its surface.
Bruce Banerdt, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explained this Tuesday at a press conference that due to costs, it was decided not to add anything specific to the robot to clean the panels because installing such a mechanism would leave “less to put in scientific instruments”. .
“Scientific Treasure”
InSight is one of four missions currently underway on the red planet, along with the American rovers Perseverance and Curiosity, and the Chinese rovers Zhurong.
Since arriving on Mars, its seismometer, made in France, has paved the way for great advances.
“The interior (of the red planet) was sort of a giant question mark,” said Banerdt, who worked on the InSight mission for more than a decade.
But thanks to this probe, “we were able to map the interior of Mars for the first time in history”.
The seismic waves, which vary according to the materials they pass through, offer an image of the interior of the planet.
Scientists were able to confirm, for example, that the core of Mars is liquid and to determine the thickness of the Martian crust, which is less dense than previously thought and is probably made up of three layers.
The magnitude 5 earthquake recorded in early May was much stronger than any on record and approached what scientists thought would be a maximum on Mars, although it would not be considered a strong earthquake on Earth.
“This earthquake will really be a treasure chest of scientific information when we get it,” said Banerdt.
The earthquakes are caused, in particular, by the movement of tectonic plates, he explained, but they can also be caused when the Earth’s crust moves due to temperature anomalies caused by its mantle.
It is this last type of tremor that scientists believe occurs on Mars.
However, InSight did not fare well in all scientific operations, such as when its thermal sensor had trouble inserting under the surface to measure the planet’s temperature due to the composition of the ground where the rover landed.
But in light of the seismometer’s success, NASA is considering using the technique in other locations in the future, said Lori Glaze, director of the agency’s Division of Planetary Sciences.
“We would really like to establish a complete network on the Moon to really understand what happens there,” he said.
