It could be the end of the red line of dust for NASA’s InSight lander, which has gone silent after four years on Mars.
The lander’s power levels have been declining for months due to all the dust covering its solar panels. Ground controllers at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory knew the end was near, but NASA reported that InSight unexpectedly failed to respond to communications from Earth on Sunday.
“It is assumed that InSight may have reached the end of its operations,” NASA said Monday afternoon, adding that its last communication was on Thursday. “It is not known what caused the change in his energy.”
The team will continue to try to contact InSight, just in case.
InSight landed on Mars in 2018 and was the first spacecraft to document an earthquake. He detected more than 1,300 earthquakes with his French-built seismometer, including several caused by meteoroid impacts. The most recent earthquake detected by InSight, earlier this year, left the ground shaking for at least six hours, according to NASA.
Seismometer readings illuminate the interior of Mars.
Last week, scientists revealed that InSight achieved another first, capturing a Martian dust devil not only in images, but also in sound. In a stroke of luck, the rotating column of dust blew directly over the 2021 lander when the microphone was on.
The lander’s other main instrument, however, encountered nothing but trouble.
A German digging device, intended to measure the temperature of the interior of Mars, never made it more than a couple of feet (half a meter), well below the predicted 5 meters. NASA declared her dead almost two years ago.
InSight recently sent back one last selfie, shared by NASA via Twitter on Monday.
“My power is very low, so this may be the last image I can send,” the team wrote on behalf of InSight. “But don’t worry about me: my time here has been productive and serene. If I can continue to talk to my mission team, I will, but I’ll close here soon. Thanks for staying with me.”
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 midst of creating a repository of samples; the plan is to leave 10 tubes of rock cores on the Martian surface as a backup for samples from the rover itself. NASA plans to bring some of these samples back to Earth within a decade, in its long-running search for signs of ancient microscopic life on Mars.
Perseverance also has a companion: a mini helicopter called Ingenuity. It has just completed its 37th flight and has now logged more than an hour of Martian flight time.