NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is no longer able to contact the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) Mars lander, which has been hard at work on the Red Planet for the past four years detecting more than 1,300 marsquakes. However, the accumulation of dust on the lander’s solar panels has ended its ability to power itself. The last communication from InSight was December 15.
Philippe Lognonné of Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, principal investigator of InSight’s seismometer, stated:
With InSight, seismology was the focus of a mission beyond Earth for the first time since the Apollo missions, when astronauts brought seismometers to the Moon…We broke new ground, and our science team can be proud of all that we’ve learned along the way.
You can read more about the InSight Mar lander’s findings here.
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