spacetoday.net: InSight Mars lander mission officially ends

Posted: Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 11:13 AM ET (1613 GMT)
InSight Mars lander dusty array (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA's InSight Mars mission is officially over, the agency announced Wednesday. The lander missed its second consecutive communications session as its power levels dropped, the threshold NASA previously set for declaring the mission over. InSight's power had been diminishing as dust accumulated on its solar panels, despite the best efforts of engineers to try and remove that dust. The lander exceeded its prime mission of one Martian year, or nearly two Earth years, recording more than 1,300 marsquakes with its seismometer. A heat flow probe, though, was never able to burrow into the surface as planned because soil properties at the landing site differed from what scientists had expected.