on May 25, 2022 | Topic: Space
InSight final selfie.
Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech
NASA’s InSight Mars landing device has sent its latest selfie of its solar panels and dust cover, in an image taken on April 24 of its 1,211 “sun” or Martian day of the mission.
Insight has been touring the red planet for the past 3.5 years, capturing images and data that allowed scientists to approximate its crust and core, and refining models of how the planets evolved from dust. it surrounded the Sun.
Insight’s scientific mission will conclude in the summer, after which it will run out of energy. The landing is powered by solar energy, but the dust covering the seven-foot-wide solar panels has reduced its production capacity from about 5,000 watts-hours per day to 500 watts-hours per day. Once these panels generated power equivalent to running an electric oven for 40 minutes, they can now only power one for 10 minutes. The landing is equipped with two 25-amp-hour lithium-ion rechargeable batteries for energy storage.
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With these limitations, even taking a selfie requires some calculation to stay within the spacecraft’s power budget. The selfie arm will now move to the “retirement position,” according to NASA.
“The arm has to be moved several times to capture a full selfie. Because InSight’s dusty solar panels produce less power, the team will soon put the robotic arm of the terrifier in its rest position (called” “puts on retirement”) during the last in May 2022, “NASA JPL said.
InSight was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on May 5, 2018 and landed on Mars on November 26, 2018, six minutes after hitting the Martian atmosphere at 12,300 mph (19,800 miles per day). hour), according to NASA. It was the eighth landing on Mars in human history.
Dust has played an important role in the ability of the InSight landing to continue the mission. An epic dust storm on Mars is believed to have been behind the disappearance of NASA’s rover Opportunity in 2018. A similar storm could also have threatened the mission of InSight. The threat of dust is twofold: dust storms obscure available sunlight, while dust directly on solar panels reduces its ability to absorb sunlight.
In September 2021, in its only 1,000th mission, InSight measured a “marsquake” with a magnitude of 4.2, which helped scientists see what’s happening beneath the surface of Mars.
Located on the dark side of Mars at the time, the dust from the solar panels was already restricting its power. NASA used Insight’s robotic arm to spray sand near a solar panel, in the hope that gusts of wind would cause the granules to sweep away some of the dust. The plan worked.
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Then, on January 7, 2022, InSight went into safe mode after a big dust storm obscured the sunlight from its solar panels. But at that time, performing the technique of “sand sweeping” had become difficult due to the reduction of available energy. InSight engineers hoped that a whirlwind would wipe the dust off the panels and restrict the use of scientific instruments. By February 15, solar panel output levels had returned to pre-storm levels.
InSight’s on-board computers for command and data management are derived from NASA’s 2014 Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) missions and its 2011 Moon Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) missions. The system has two redundant computers. Its core is a radiation-hardened 115.5 MHz CPU with a PowerPC 750 architecture called RAD 750 manufactured by BAE Systems.
Its flight software is written in C and C ++ on the VxWorks real-time operating system, which monitors the health of the spacecraft, checks for commands, and manages communications and controls. It also checks for errors and manages corrective steps when it detects irregularities.
An animation of the latest selfie.
Image: NASA / JPL-Caltech