The Mars InSight Lander Is Powering Down. Here ’ s What It Discovered Over its Lifetime

The tweet that came from Mars Monday morning actually didn’t originate from anywhere near there. It came from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where the mission of the Mars InSight lander is managed. Still, the message was a poignant one. “My power’s really low,” read the tweet, which was accompanied by a picture taken by the spacecraft, “so this may be the last image I can send. Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will—but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] NASA has managed a Twitter feed posting messages “from” InSight ever since the spacecraft landed on the Red Planet on Nov. 26, 2018, for a mission that was supposed to last just shy of two Earth years, but actually more than doubled that. In its time on Mars, InSight has performed stoically—weathering accumulations of dust that partially obscured its solar panels (and that finally overcame them with the shutdown Monday) and breakdowns that prevented one of its key instruments from working as it should. But nonetheless over its lifetime the spacecraft beamed back a wealth of data principally about the Martian interior. InSight was built to do more than study Mars alone; it was designed to provide new clues to planetary evolution as a whole. Earth, which has active plate ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news