Another Mars robot is settling in for a long, long sleep.
With dust caking its solar panels, InSight has been losing the ability to recharge for months — in the spring, it was operating at just one-tenth of its landing power. Now the thick layers of dust might have doomed InSight for good. NASA announced on December 19 that its InSight lander had not responded to communications from Earth, and “it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations.”
InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport, landed on Mars on November 26, 2018. Its mission was to study the interior structure and composition of Mars over a period of 709 Martian sols (local Martian days), or 728 Earth days, primarily through seismographic recordings. Like many of NASA’s other Mars robots, the lander has far exceeded the planned mission duration — as of Decembe...
