NASA prepares to say goodbye to InSight; To learn more

The day is approaching when the InSight spacecraft from NASA will remain silent, having completed its historic mission to reveal the secrets of internal March.

Power generation spaceship continues to decrease as windblown dust builds up on the solar panels, so the team has taken steps to keep working as long as possible. energy what’s left is expected to come to an end in the next few weeks.

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But even as the 25 to 30-man task force — a small group compared to other Mars missions — continues to squeeze as much as they can out of InSight, they have also begun to take steps to complete the mission. Look below to see how it goes.

saving data

The most important last step in InSight’s mission is to secure your data and make it available to researchers around the world. The probe’s data provided detailed information about Mars’ interior layers, its liquid core, the remarkably volatile remnants beneath the surface of its near-extinct magnetic field, the weather in this part of Mars, and significant seismic activity.

The InSight seismometer provided by the French National Center for Space Research (CNES) has recorded more than 1,300 earthquakes since the probe landed in November 2018, the largest measurement of magnitude 5 on the Richter scale. He even recorded earthquakes from meteorite impacts.

Watching how the seismic waves from these earthquakes change as they travel across the planet provides invaluable insights into the interior of Mars, as well as a better understanding of how all rocky worlds, including the Earth and its Moon, are formed.

“Finally, we can see Mars as a multi-layered planet with different thicknesses and compositions,” said Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, USA, the mission’s principal investigator. “We are starting to really reveal the details. Now it’s not just this mystery; it’s actually a living, breathing planet.”

The seismograph readings will join the only other sets of extraterrestrial seismic data, from the Apollo lunar missions and the Viking missions to Mars, in NASA’s Planetary Data System.

They will also be part of an international archive operated by Embedded Research Institutions for Seismology that stores “all data locations in the land seismic network,” said JPL’s Sue Smrekar, InSight’s deputy principal investigator. “Now we have another one on Mars.” Smrekar said the data should continue to generate discoveries in the coming decades.

energy management

By early summer, the spacecraft had so little power left that the mission shut down all other InSight science instruments to keep the seismometer running.

They even disabled a fail-safe system that would otherwise automatically shut down the seismograph if the system detects that the module’s power output is dangerously low.

“We had less than 20% of the original generating capacity,” Banerdt said. “That means we can’t afford to be constantly working with appliances.”

Recently, after a dust storm added to the spacecraft’s dust-covered solar panels, the team decided to turn off the seismometer entirely to save power.

Now that the storm has ended, the seismograph is collecting data again, although the mission is hoping the lander will have enough power for a few more weeks.

“Of the seismometer’s sensor suite, only the most sensitive ones were still working,” said Liz Barrett, who leads science and instrumentation operations on the JPL team, adding, “We’re continuing this to the end.”

double pack

A silent member of the team is ForeSight, a full-size engineering model of InSight at JPL’s In-Situ Instrumentation Lab. Engineers used ForeSight to practice how InSight would place scientific instruments on the Martian surface using the robotic probe arm, test methods for placing the probe’s thermal probe in Mars’ sticky soil, and develop ways to reduce the noise picked up by the seismometer.

ForeSight will be packaged and saved. “We will pack it carefully,” Banerdt said. “It’s been a great tool, great company for us throughout this mission.”

Mission End Announcement

NASA will announce a mission end when InSight misses two consecutive communications with a Mars-orbiting spacecraft on the Mars relay network, but only if the spacecraft itself is the cause of the loss, said JPL’s network manager Roy Gladden. After that, the NASA Deep Space Network will listen for a while, just in case.

There will be no heroic steps to restore communication with InSight. While a mission-saving event — say, a strong gust of wind that clears the panels — is not out of the question, it is considered unlikely.

For now, as long as InSight stays connected, the team will continue to collect data. “We will continue to make scientific measurements for as long as we can,” Banerdt said. “We are at the mercy of Mars. The weather on Mars is not rain and snow; the weather on Mars is dust and wind.”

By using NASA

Featured image: Fabiobispo3D/Shutterstock

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