NASA’s Insight lander is losing power because of dust accumulation on its solar panels. On Tuesday, the space agency said it will keep using the spacecraft’s seismometer to analyze marsquakes until the power fully depletes. They predict the lander will run out of power by July.
NASA will continue to use flight controllers to monitor the Insight lander until the end of this year. The principal scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Bruce Banerdt said “There really hasn’t been too much doom and gloom on the team. We’re really focused on operating the spacecraft,”
The lander touched Martian soil in 2018 and was able to detect more than 1,300 marsquakes. The largest one happened two weeks ago and was a magnitude 5. This will count as NASA’s second Mars lander that will be lost to dust. In 2018 the Opportunity rover was taken out by a global dust storm.
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