After four years on Mars, the InSight lander has finally powered down for good.
NASA’s InSight mission has officially concluded after Martian dust choked its solar panels, leaving the lander in a state engineers call a dead bus. Despite the quiet, the mission leaves behind a treasure trove of seismic data that has fundamentally changed our understanding of the Red Planet’s deep interior.
Launched in May 2018 and arriving that November, InSight was designed to peer beneath the Martian surface. Its primary goal was to study the planet’s crust, mantle, and core, marking the first time since the Apollo missions that seismology was the focus of an extraterrestrial exploration. Over its four-year lifespan, the lander detected 1,319 marsquakes, including those triggered by meteoroid impacts that revealed boulder-sized chunks of ice. These findings provided scientists with a new way to date the Martian surface and understand the remnants of its extinct magnetic dynamo.
The mission faced significant technical hurdles, most notably with the German-provided heat probe nicknamed the mole. Designed to dig 16 feet (5 meters) into the soil to measure internal heat, the device struggled in unexpectedly clumpy dirt. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the German Aerospace Center worked inventively to bury the probe to a depth of 16 inches (40 centimeters), gathering valuable data on thermal properties that will aid future missions. To combat the encroaching dust that eventually ended the mission, the team even used the lander’s robotic arm to sprinkle dirt onto the solar panels, using wind to sweep the surfaces clean.
The mission was a global collaboration, involving contributions from France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and various European research institutions. While NASA’s mission controllers declared the mission over after two consecutive missed communication attempts—the last contact occurring on December 15—the legacy of the data remains. By mapping the interior of Mars, InSight has provided insights that extend beyond the Red Planet, offering a comparative model for understanding other rocky bodies, including Earth itself. The lander now rests in retirement, having successfully lived up to its name: Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.
Source: InSight End of Mission: Our Time on Mars (Live Public Talk)
