NASA ends InSight Mars lander mission after failed communication attempts

The American space agency is definitively retiring the InSight lander, because contact seems to be over. The mission ends more than four years after the lander successfully arrived on the red planet.

Mission controllers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are here despite multiple attempts no longer succeeded to contact the lander. That led to the conclusion that the batteries of the spacecraft are empty and can no longer provide energy. This state in which InSight is most likely to be, is also referred to by the engineers as ‘dead bus’. The mission team has previously brought the robotic arm to a resting position.

NASA had previously indicated that it would consider the mission terminated if two communication attempts failed. A signal is still being listened to, but NASA considers it unlikely that any sign of life will be received. On December 15, there was contact for the last time.

The space agency recently published another photo that InSight took. It was already assumed that that photo would be the last. This has to do with the amount of dust that has settled on the solar panels. That amount has continued to increase in recent months and as a result, the amount of electricity that could still be generated has decreased considerably. At the end of October, a final term of six weeks was already assumed.

InSight’s mission began when the lander arrived on Mars in November 2018. A month later, Insight snapped its first full-length selfie. The planned mission was completed in 2020 and extended into 2022. InSight has been sent to Mars for soil research. The lander was launched primarily to answer questions about the structure and energetics of the interior of the planet Mars. To find out more about this, the lander measured the thickness of the crust, the size and the density of the core, among other things. Earlier this year, Insight measured the largest earthquake on Mars to date and also discovered a meteorite impact.

The last selfie InSight took, taken on April 24. Visible is the considerable amount of dust covering the lander.