Four years after it landed on the surface of the red planet, NASA has officially deactivated its Mars InSight lander, the first robotic probe created specifically to examine the deep interior of a faraway globe. The US space agency made the announcement on Wednesday.
When two successive attempts to re-establish radio contact with the lander failed, indicating that InSight's solar-powered batteries had run out of power, mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles decided the mission was ended.
Increasing amounts of dust on the spacecraft's solar panels, which are reducing the capacity of its batteries to recharge, led NASA to estimate in late October that the spacecraft will reach the end of its operational life in a matter of weeks.
Just in case, JPL engineers will keep listening for a signal from the lander, but hearing from InSight again is unlikely, according to NASA. The last time the three-legged stationary probe spoke with Earth was on December 15.
InSight, whose original two-year mission was later extended to four, landed on Mars in late November 2018 with equipment meant to detect planetary seismic rumblings that had never been observed anywhere other than Earth.
The lander has assisted researchers in gaining a fresh knowledge of Mars' interior structure from its vantage point in the enormous and rather flat Elysium Planitia plain, which is located just north of the planet's equator.
According to researchers, InSight's data revealed the structure of the planet's mantle, as well as the size and density of the inner core and the thickness of the outer crust of the planet.
With more than 1,300 marsquakes recorded, InSight was able to prove that the red planet is indeed seismically active. It measured the seismic waves that meteorite impacts produce as well.
Associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate Thomas Zurbuchen remarked, "The seismic data alone from this discovery program mission gives great insights not just into Mars but other rocky worlds, including Earth."
It was discovered that one such impact gouged boulder-sized chunks of water ice surprisingly close to Mars' equator a year ago.
Even as NASA's science rover Perseverance, a more recent robotic visitor to the red planet, prepares a collection of Martian mineral samples for upcoming analysis on Earth, InSight retires.
In case the primary supply kept in the rover's belly cannot be transported as intended to a retrieval vehicle in the future, Perseverance this week dropped off the first of 10 sample tubes it was instructed to leave at a surface collecting point on Mars, according to NASA.