NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) recently caught a glimpse of the agency’s retired InSight lander, documenting the accumulation of dust on the spacecraft’s solar panels. In a new image taken Oct. 23 by MRO’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, InSight’s solar panels have taken on a reddish-gray hue like the rest of the planet.
After touching down in November 2018, the lander was the first to detect the Red Planet. earthquake, Showing details of the crust, mantle and core in action. During the four years that the spacecraft gathered science, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which led the mission, used images from it. insightCameras and MROOf HiRISE To assess how much dust was accumulating on the stationary lander’s solar panels, as the dust affected its ability to generate electricity.
NASA retired InSight in December 2022, when the lander lost power and lost contact with Earth. Extended mission. But engineers continued to listen for radio signals from the lander if the wind cleared enough dust from the spacecraft’s solar panels to recharge its batteries. After not detecting any changes for the past two years, NASA will stop listening to InSight later this year.
Scientists used the recent HiRISE image to bid farewell to InSight as well as monitor how its landing site has changed over time.
“Even though we’re no longer hearing from InSight, it’s still teaching us about Mars,” said Ingrid Dober, a member of the science team at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “By monitoring how much dust accumulates on the surface — and how much is blown away by wind and dust devils — we learn more about wind, dust cycles, and other processes that shape the planet.”
Dust is a driving force on Mars, shaping both the atmosphere and the landscape. Studying it helps scientists understand the planet and engineers prepare for future missions (solar-powered and otherwise), because dust can get into sensitive mechanical parts.
While InSight was still active, scientists matched images from MRO. Dust Devil Tracks Moving across the landscape with data from the lander’s wind sensors, these weather phenomena subside in winter and resume in summer.
Visualization also helped in the study. Meteoroid impacts The more craters a region has on the Martian surface, the older the surface is. (This is not the case with Earth’s surface, which is constantly recycled as tectonic plates slide over each other.) The marks around these craters are eroded over time. Understanding how quickly dust covers them helps determine the crater’s age.
Another way to estimate how fast the craters fade is to study the blast marks left by InSight’s retrorocket thrusters during landing. a lot More prominent in 2018those black markings are now returning to the reddish-brown color of the surrounding area.
HiRISE has acquired many other images of the spacecraft, including images from NASA Persistence And Curiosity rovers, which are still exploring Mars, as well as inactive missions, such as The soul And Opportunity Rovers And Phoenix Lander.
“Looking back at InSight now is a little bittersweet. It was a successful mission that produced a lot of great science. Of course, it would have been nice if it had gone on forever, but we knew it wouldn’t,” Dauber said.
The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado. A division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL manages the MRO project and manages InSight for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
The InSight mission was part of NASA’s Discovery Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supported spacecraft operations for the mission.
Several European partners, including France’s Center National de Tudes Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), supported the InSight mission. CNES provided the seismic experiment for internal structures (SEISInstrument for NASA with IPGP (Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris) principal investigator. Important contributions to SEIS have come from IPGP. the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland; Imperial College London and Oxford University in the UK; and JPL. DLR provided the heat flow and physical properties package (HP3instrument with significant contributions from the Polish Academy of Sciences and Austronica’s Space Research Center (CBK) in Poland. Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) provided temperature and wind sensors.
For more information about the mission:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/insight
science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-reconnaissance-orbiter
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
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