(ORDO NEWS) — NASA‘s InSight lander has gone silent after four years on Mars.
The lander’s power level has been declining for several months due to dust covering its solar panels. Ground controllers at the California Jet Propulsion Laboratory knew the end was near.
InSight unexpectedly did not respond to messages from Earth.
“It is speculated that InSight may have ended its operations,” NASA said late Monday night.
The last message from the module was received on Thursday. The team will continue to attempt to contact InSight.
InSight landed on Mars in 2018 and became the first spacecraft to document a marsquake.
With his seismometer, he recorded more than 1300 marsquakes, including several caused by meteoroid impacts.
Just last week, scientists reported that InSight had achieved yet another success by capturing the Martian dust devil not only in pictures but also in audio recordings.
Luckily, a swirling column of dust swept right over the lander in 2021 while its microphone was on.
However, the lander’s other main instrument only ran into problems.
The German device, designed to measure the temperature of the interior of Mars, has never dived deeper than half a meter, which is much less than the planned 5 meters. NASA announced its failure two years ago.
InSight recently sent back the latest selfie shared by NASA on social media on Monday.
NASA still has two active rovers on Mars: Curiosity, which has been roaming the surface since 2012, and Perseverance, which arrived early last year.
Perseverance is in the process of creating a sample repository.
The plan is to leave 10 tubes of rock cores on the Martian surface as a backup of the samples stored on the rover itself. NASA plans to bring some of these samples back to Earth.
Perseverance also has a satellite, a mini helicopter named Ingenuity, which recently completed its 37th flight.
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