Editor’s note: An update to this story, NASA Retires InSight Mars Lander Mission After Years of Science, was published on Dec.21.
On Dec. 18, 2022, InSight did not respond to communications from Earth. As expected, the lander’s power has been declining for months, and it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations. NASA will declare the mission over when InSight misses two consecutive communication sessions with the spacecraft orbiting Mars, part of the Mars Relay Network – but only if the cause of the missed communication is the lander itself. After that, NASA’s Deep Space Network will listen for a time, just in case.
InSight launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on May 5, 2018. After a six-month cruise, InSight landed on Mars on Nov. 26, 2018, and immediately began surface operations at Elysium Planitia, but science data collection didn’t start fully until about 10 weeks after landing. That’s because InSight’s science goals and instruments are very different from other Mars landers or rovers. In some ways, InSight’s science activities were designed to be more like a marathon than a sprint. Over the past four years, 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.Learn more about InSight, the first mission to explore Mars’ deep interior.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech