NASA prepares to bid farewell to Insight. know more

The day the InSight spacecraft launches is approaching NASA She will remain silent, completing her historical mission to reveal the secrets of the interior Mars.

power generation from space ship It continues to fall as wind-blown dust accumulates on the solar panels, so the team has taken steps to persist as long as possible with energy What remains to be expected is that the end will arrive in the next few weeks.

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But even as the 25 to 30-member operations team—a small group compared to other missions to Mars—continue to squeeze as much InSight as possible, they’ve also begun taking steps to finish the mission. See below for a glimpse of how this happens.

Data preservation

The most important final steps of InSight’s mission is to store your data and make it available to researchers around the world. The probe’s data provided details about Mars’ inner layers, its liquid core, the surprisingly variable remnants below the surface of the near-extinct magnetic field, the weather in this part of Mars, and much of the seismic activity.

The InSight seismometer, provided by the French National Center for Space Studies (CNES), has detected more than 1,300 earthquakes since the probe landed in November 2018, the largest measuring 5 on the Richter scale. He even recorded earthquakes from the impacts of meteorites.

Watching how the seismic waves from these earthquakes change as they travel across the planet provides invaluable insight into the interior of Mars, but also provides a better understanding of how all of the rocky worlds, including Earth and the Moon, form.

“Finally, we can see Mars as a multilayered planet, with different thicknesses and textures,” said Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, USA, who is the principal investigator for the mission. We’ve already started revealing the details. Now this is not just a puzzle. It is actually a living, breathing planet.”

The seismometer readings will join the only other extraterrestrial seismic data sets, from the Apollo lunar and Viking Mars missions, in NASA’s Planetary Data System.

JPL’s Sue Smrekar, deputy principal investigator at InSight, said she will also enter an international archive operated by the Integrated Seismology Research Institutions, which includes “all data sites in the Earth’s seismic network.” “Now, we also have one on Mars.” Smrekar said the data should continue to generate discoveries for decades to come.

Energy management

By early summer, the spacecraft had so little power left that the mission shut down all of InSight’s other science instruments to keep the seismometer working.

They even turned off the safe system that would have automatically shut down the seismograph if the system detected that the unit’s power generation was dangerously low.

“We’ve reduced it to less than 20% of the original generation capacity,” Banerdt said. “That means we can’t afford to run the tools all the time.”

Recently, after adding a regional dust storm to the spacecraft’s dust-covered solar panels, the team decided to shut down the seismometer entirely to save energy.

Now that the storm is over, the seismograph is collecting data again – although the mission hopes the probe will only have enough power for a few more weeks.

Of the array of sensors in the seismograph, only the most sensitive were still operating, said Liz Barrett, who leads scientific operations and instruments for the JPL team.

double pack

A silent member of the team is ForeSight, the full-size engineering model for InSight at JPL’s In-Situ Instrumentation Laboratory. Engineers used ForeSight to practice how InSight would place scientific instruments on Mars using the rover’s robotic arm, test techniques for placing the probe’s heat probe into Mars’ sticky soil, and develop ways to reduce the noise the seismometer picks up.

Forsight will be stored and stored. “We’ll pack it carefully,” Banerdt said. “It’s been a great tool, great company for us throughout this mission.”

Announcement of the end of the task

NASA will declare the mission over when InSight misses two consecutive sessions of communication with the Mars-orbiting spacecraft, which is part of the Mars Relay Network — but only if the loss of communication is caused by the spacecraft itself, said network administrator Roy Gladden of JPL. Then, NASA’s Deep Space Network will be listening for a while, just in case.

There will be no heroic steps to reconnect with InSight. While a mission-saving event—a strong gust of wind, for example, brushing the panels—is not out of the question, it is considered unlikely.

For now, as long as InSight remains in touch, the team will continue to collect data. “We will continue to do scientific measurements for as long as possible,” Banerdt said. “We are at the mercy of Mars. The weather on Mars is not rain and snow. The weather on Mars is dust and wind.”

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Featured Image: Fabiobispo3D / Shutterstock

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