End of the InSight mission on Mars: in Toulouse, CNES remains in contact and hopes for a dust devil
NASA no longer has contact with the InSight probe on Mars. The mission ends after four years of studying the internal composition of the planet. At CNES, in Toulouse, the team that worked on the SEIS seismometer is on standby. The hope of receiving news from the instrument is not completely extinguished. For that, it would take a dust devil…
NASA officially announced, on December 21, 2022, the end of the InSight mission to the planet Mars. The last attempts of the American space agency to contact the lander having failed, it concluded that the solar batteries of the machine had run out of energy. This would be a consequence of the accumulation of dust on the solar panels of the lander which arrived on Mars on November 26, 2018.
My power is really low, so this might be the last image I can send. Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and peaceful. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will – but I’ll be signing here soon. Thanks for staying with me. pic.twitter.com/wkYKww15kQ
—NASA InSight (@NASAInSight) December 19, 2022
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In four years, the data collected by the InSight mission have made it possible to collect valuable data on the internal constitution of the planet, on what remains of its magnetic field and on its seismic activity. The main instrument, the French seismometer SEIS, designed in Toulouse under contracting authority of CNES, played an essential role. It thus allowed the recording of 1318 earthquakes including a “big one” of magnitude 4.7 and major meteorite impacts. “The mission worked extremely well and the performance of our instrument has collected so much data on the planet Mars that no other similar mission is planned. This success also validates the concept of planetary seismology for future missions on Titan -natural satellite of Saturn- (Dragonfly mission in 2027) and on the Moon (FSS in 2025)“, summarizes Charles Yana, SEIS-InSight project manager at CNES for four years. Committed to InSight for ten years, he measures his “luckyness to have participated in this less complex mission than others on Mars (he also worked on the Curiosity rover’s ChemCam laser camera) and so rewarding for the importance of our SEIS instrument”.
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NASA will listen to the probe every month
At the Toulouse space center (CNES), the teams involved in the reception and analysis of data will spend their first Christmas without InSight. “There is not necessarily sadness or an attachment phenomenon. We are also working on other missions and we are pragmatic, it is about a robot on another planet. For six months and the decline of “energy of the probe, we know that everything we do is a bonus”, explains Charles Yana.
And the bonus may not be over. The JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA laboratory specializing in robotic space missions) has indeed decided to monitor the InSight probe by listening to it every month for three years. “It’s not an announcement effect, there is always a hope that it will light up again, especially if a dust devil passes over it and cleans the solar panels. The Perseverance rover recorded one in its area , So why not on the InSight field? If the batteries are not damaged and if the probe contacts the Earth at the time of the passage of the transmission satellite, it can work!”, Details Charles Yana. In this configuration, the CNES and JPL teams will have 30 days to become operational again. “With all these assumptions, we really realize the technological prowess of such a mission!”