Nasa’s Insight Mars lander goes dark after 4 years on Red Planet

‘It’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations’

Nasa’s iconic Insight Mars lander has gone dark after four years of studying the Red Planet, the space agency has announced.

The lander’s power has been on the decline for months and Nasa said earlier this week that InSight did not respond to communications from Earth.

“It’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations,” Nasa said in a statement on Sunday.

On Monday, the lander’s official Twitter account also posted an image of the planet’s rocky surface in what might be its final update.

“It’s unknown what prompted the change in its energy; the last time the mission contacted the spacecraft was on 15 December 2022,” the American space agency added.

Since landing on Mars in November 2018, InSight – an acronym for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport – has shed valuable insights on several geological phenomena on Mars.

The stationary lander carried with it seismology and heat sensing instruments to analyse the internal structure of Mars.

Days after landing on Mars, Insight captured the “haunting low rumble” of Martian winds in December 2018, and more recently, in May, it detected the largest quake ever observed on Mars and any planet other than Earth.

Since landing on the Red Planet, Insight has recorded over 1,300 marsquakes – the largest of them measuring about magnitude five.

Research conducted based on data from Insight’s missions also helped prove in October that Mars’ crust is denser and more uniform than scientists previously thought, an advance that can help better understand how the planet formed and evolved over time.

It also detected the first ever seismic and sound waves generated on another planet by meteorite strikes.

Analysing how the quakes resulting from these meteorite strikes travelled through the planet offered an unprecedented glimpse into Mars’ interior, and also threw more light on how rocky worlds, such as the Earth and its Moon, form.

Nasa noted in a statement last month that the data from the lander could “continue yielding discoveries for decades.”

During its time on the Red Planet, the lander also faced several challenges in carrying out its scientific missions, including a time in April last year when it went into “emergency hibernation” since its solar panels got covered in dust.

While the American space agency tried several innovative ways to clean the dust off InSight’s solar panels, including the deployment of its motors to shake the dust off, many of its efforts weren’t successful.

Some efforts, however, were successful in removing dust and helping Insight work on its extended missions, but on Sunday Nasa confirmed that the lander did not respond to communications from Earth.

The space agency added that it would continue to try and establish contact with InSight.