Over on Mars, when the voltage in InSight’s batteries dropped below the critical threshold, the lander entered what its designers call “dead bus mode,” said Bruce Banerdt, the mission’s principal investigator. Anything that isn’t claimed will go into storage. With the mission now at its end, the testbed is being dismantled and its individual parts offered to other teams at JPL to repurpose for their own needs, Mishra said. Whatever emotions InSight and Foresight evoke, practicalities have to come first. “I was very emotionally invested in this mission.” “My little piece of it didn’t quite do everything we wanted it to do,” Hudson said, which makes InSight’s retirement feel bittersweet. While that little bit allowed scientists to study the soil’s thermal properties, they couldn’t probe far enough into the crust to measure the planet’s interior heat flow. Ultimately, the soil beneath InSight’s probe turned out to be of a different density and texture than planners had expected, and the mole was never able to get enough friction to dig more than a few centimeters. Again and again they tried alternative angles that might allow the mole to gain traction without damaging its delicate tether. They lifted ForeSight on a platform and brought in an extra box of fake Mars dirt for the replica probe to dig in. With the replica positioned at the same angle as its Martian counterpart, and the Mars lights set to reproduce the conditions captured by InSight’s cameras, engineers walked through countless alternatives that might solve the mole’s problem. When engineers watched the lander’s video footage of its attempt to deploy the mole, they realized something was wrong: the 16-inch-long pile driver was hammering away, but wasn’t getting anywhere.įor 22 months, instrument systems engineer Troy Hudson led the troubleshooting effort. InSight was equipped with a heat probe, nicknamed the “mole,” that was supposed to burrow into the planet’s crust to measure interior heat. To check how the lander’s cameras would process sunlight - which scatters differently than artificial lighting - they rolled ForeSight into the parking lot.įor all its triumphs, the ForeSight testbed has also been a place of frustration. They installed a set of overhead lamps that bathed the testbed in a dim golden glow of a day on Mars, which gets less than half the sunlight that Earth does. “My job is basically to stack two Russian dolls 100 million miles away, blindfolded,” Trebi-Ollennu said.Įngineers used ForeSight to rehearse each step of the process hundreds - and sometimes thousands - of times, testing their procedure in an array of simulated conditions. To do this, the lander had to deploy a basketball-sized seismometer sensitive enough to detect the movement of an individual atom, and then place a shield over it to protect the instrument from the elements.Įnsuring this sequence of events went smoothly on Mars required countless repetitions on Earth. One of InSight’s primary goals was to record seismic activity on Mars that might provide insights into the planet’s internal structure. It’s had balloons tied on to mimic its weight in Martian gravity, and motion capture dots stuck to its frame to precisely measure its movements. When InSight encountered problems on Mars, engineers put ForeSight through a barrage of troubleshooting exercises on Earth. Every move InSight has ever made has been tested hundreds of times or more on its terrestrial twin. And when it did, it spelled the end for ForeSight, Insight’s counterpart at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.įor the past four years, ForeSight has been stationed in a bed of faux Martian soil the size of a suburban home’s driveway, tilted at the exact same angle as its distant doppelganger. With the solar panels out of commission, the batteries can’t generate enough voltage to keep the spacecraft’s instruments online, prompting the lander to power itself down and bringing the mission to an official end, NASA announced Wednesday. More than 50 million miles away, a critical amount of actual Mars dust has covered the solar panels of NASA’s InSight lander, which had been studying the red planet’s crust, mantle, core and seismic activity since 2018.
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