NASA’s InSight Lander Accomplishes Science Goals on Mars as Power Levels Diminish

NASA’s InSight lander touched down in the Elysium Planitia region of Mars in November of 2018. During its time on the Red Planet, InSight has achieved all its primary science goals and continues to hunt for quakes on Mars.

The mission is the first to reveal the interior structure of Mars, using marsquakes to study the layers inside the planet. InSight’s seismometer was the first to detect a quake on another planet. InSight also measured weather at Elysium Planitia for four years with a unique set of meteorological sensors.

InSight has also persisted through adversity. The team found innovative ways to take on engineering challenges they encountered. InSight’s findings help scientists understand how all rocky worlds, including Earth and its Moon, formed.

For more information on InSight, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/

TRANSCRIPT

(Mission Control)

Touchdown confirmed.

Bruce Banerdt
InSight has been fantastically successful. We've gotten more science than we had ever dreamed that we would get during the course of this mission. Insight's primary goal was to better understand how the terrestrial planets, the rocky planets formed and evolved.

Mark Panning
First, we landed an incredibly sensitive seismometer on the surface of Mars, and with that we are able to record over 1300 Mars quakes.

Bruce Banerdt
And these range all the way from tiny little temblors that just barely go over the noise background to a handful of quakes that were larger than magnitude four.

Elizabeth Barrett
And feeling those vibrations the scientists can actually take that information and use that to reconstruct all the material that those Mars quakes traveled through and thereby see the interior of the planet.

Mark Panning
We looked at its core, which is big and not very dense.We looked at its mantle, which is not so hot, and we looked at its crust, which is not too thick and not too dense compared to some of our permission expectations.

Bruce Banerdt
By measuring the detailed structure of the inside of Mars, it gives us a snapshot of what the planet looked like. Four and a half billion years ago. The other thing that we've been able to do is make a very detailed record of the weather at Mars. But we have a really good weather station which has allowed meteorologists to study the weather at the at the Insight Landing site and relate that to the climate changes on Mars.

What we didn't do, unfortunately, was make the heat flow measurement we wanted to make. Our heat flow probe was supposed to get 3 to 5 meters down,and we were unable to reach that depth.

Elizabeth Barrett
But we were able to get some of those measurements,such as the heat transfer among the soil.

Bruce Banerdt
InSight is a solar powered mission. We have solar panels, and they were designed to give us enough power to easily get through the first two years.

Elizabeth Barrett
But there's a lot of dust in Mars's atmosphere, and that's falling down on top of our solar arrays and slowly blocking the sun.

Bruce Banerdt
As the panels are getting dustier. We started wracking our brains of whether there's anything we can do to try to clean off those panels ourselves.

Kathya Garcia
When the idea of using dirt to clean the solar arrays was first proposed, it seemed counterintuitive.

Elizabeth Barrett
We were actually able to use the arm and the scoop to scoop up some soil from the ground and dump it over the lander, having some of that heavier sand blow onto the arrays and knock some of the dust off. So we essentially used it as an array cleaning tool.

Kathya Garcia
Cleaning with dirt actually worked!

Bruce Banerdt
It allowed us to actually keep the instruments going during the low power season where the Mars is farthest from the sun during the winter. Unfortunately, later in the summer, we think that the power is going to be dropping so quickly due to the atmosphere getting dustier due to the alignment of Mars and the sun.

Kathya Garcia
We're going to be at a point where we can no longer have all of our instruments on, which means we'll be turning off the seismometer and other instruments on board.The last day is going to be bittersweet. Obviously, we're preparing for it.

Elizabeth Barrett
We know it's coming. But that first moment where we don't hear from the lander when we expect to, that's going to be tough.

Mark Panning
It's left a permanent mark on me and I literally tattooed InSight onto my arm. I'll never let it go.

Bruce Banerdt
We've really rewritten sort of the chapter of the encyclopedia on the interior of Mars. That was our last big hole in our understanding of the planet. There's a lot of data that people are going to be looking at for decades to come.

Elizabeth Barrett
We accomplished so many of our science goals, and we're going to have something to look back on and be proud.