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NASA has shared the latest self-portrait the Mars Insight lander will take, showing fabric-covered solar panels that blend into the surrounding regolith. The InSight mission is expected to end this year, and the probe will need all of its remaining power to collect as much scientific data as possible.
At a press conference last week, NASA announced that: InSight will probably cease all activities at the end of 2022† The end of the mission is due to the amount of dust accumulating on the spacecraft’s solar panels, limiting the amount of power the spacecraft can draw from.
For three years, InSight has been hard at work on the surface of Mars, Taking pictures of the skies of Mars And use the seismometer to detect swamps. For two years, the probe has attempted to use the “Mole” heat probe to drill into the Martian surface, Before the tool gets stuck in the spongy ground† Earlier this month, the lander Discover the largest seismicity known to date On another planet: Somewhere inside Mars, a magnitude 5 earthquake occurred.
The probe also gave scientists Best view of the interior of Mars, So are the geological and seismic systems operating on the planet today. InSight has detected 1,313 earthquakes so far, and so far it can detect more before science operations are over.
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The mission’s end has been a creeping certainty. The lander has previously been Enforced in safe modes of dust storms on Mars. bridging measures It helped remove some dust from the plates — that is, by deliberately dumping Martian dust onto the dust to expel it — but such measures seem to have prolonged the inevitable.
This latest selfie was taken on April 24 and shows the amount of dust that has accumulated on the spacecraft’s solar panels. It’s a lot more dust than was found in the lander’s first and second selfies, Created in December 2018 In Between March and April 2019.
The selfies are a mosaic, meaning they are stitched together from multiple photos, with each photo requiring the robotic arm holding the landing camera to be in a different position. With power dwindling, selfies just aren’t worth draining the batteries, and the robotic arm will move into rest mode (or “retirement mode”) this month, according to NASA.
At last week’s press conference, Cathia Zamora Garcia, deputy project manager for InSight, said the Earth rover’s science operations could end as early as mid-July, but the climate on Mars is unpredictable.
No matter how much time is left for InSight, we’ll probably never see the lander in such a great panorama again.
More: Dust storm sends Chinese Mars rover into safe mode
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