Japan aerospace exploration agency, Space agency

Washington, Nov 2 NASA's Mars InSight lander is set to fall silent in the next few weeks, ending its history-making mission to reveal secrets of the Red Planet's interior.The spacecraft's power generation continues to decline as windblown dust on its solar panels thickens, so the team has taken steps to continue as long as possible with what power remains, the US space agency said in a statement late on Tuesday.The most important of the final steps with the InSight mission is storing its trove of data and making it accessible to researchers around the world.The lander data has yielded details about Mars' interior layers, its liquid core, the surprisingly variable remnants beneath the surface of its mostly extinct magnetic field, weather on this part of Mars, and lots of quake activity.InSight's seismometer has detected more than 1,300 marsquakes since the lander touched down in November 2018, the largest measuring a magnitude 5."Finally, we can see Mars as a planet with layers, with different thicknesses, compositions. We're starting to really tease out the details. Now it's not just this enigma; it's actually a living, breathing planet," said Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.Earlier this summer, the lander had so little remaining power that the mission turned off all of InSight's other science instruments in order to keep the seismometer running.They even turned off the fault protection system that would otherwise automatically shut down the seismometer if the system detects that the lander's power generation is dangerously low."We were down to less than 20 per cent of the original generating capacity," said Banerdt. "That means we can't afford to run the instruments around the clock."NASA will declare the mission over when InSight misses two consecutive communication sessions with the spacecraft orbiting Mars, part of the Mars Relay Network.There will be no heroic measures to re-establish contact with InSight.In the meantime, as long as InSight remains in contact, the team will continue gathering data.Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor

Japan Aerospace Exploration AgencyFOLLOW

Japan aerospace exploration agency, Latest News

NASA's much-awaited Mission Artemis I to the moon, was officially launched at 1:47 AM according to Eastern Time, which ... ...

Chandigarh, Nov 13 Concrete steps taken by the Manohar Lal Khattar government in Haryana to curb stubble burning ... ...

Washington, Nov 12 A TV documentary crew seeking the wreckage of a World War II-era aircraft has discovered ... ...

Washington, Nov 10 NASA has once again delayed its Artemis I Moon mission launch owing to a tropical ... ...

Computer simulations by Rice University scientists and their collaborators are the first to integrate a model of planet formation ... ...

Washington, Nov 7 After several failed attempts, the US space agency is hopeful that on November 14, it ... ...

7 a.m. ET. The launch will stream live on NASA's website. ...

Washington, Nov 2 NASA's Mars InSight lander is set to fall silent in the next few weeks, ending ... ...