NASA’s InSight Mars probe took this last selfie on April 24, 2022, the mission’s 1,211th Martian day, or sun. The lander’s solar panels have been covered in dust since the lander touched down on Mars in November 2018, causing a gradual decrease in its power level. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The InSight team is taking steps to help the solar-powered lander continue to operate for as long as possible.
Recently, NASA’s InSight mission, which is expected to end in the near future, saw a drop in power generated by its solar panels as a continent-sized dust storm swirled over the Southern Hemisphere. March First observed on September 21, 2022 by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the storm is approximately 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers) from InSight and initially had little impact on the lander.
InSight was launched on an Atlas V-401 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on May 5, 2018. After a six-month cruise, InSight landed on Mars on November 26, 2018. After ‘ a safe landing, InSight deployed its instruments in preparation for surface operations. The lander began its day-to-day science activities about 30 days into the mission.
The mission is carefully monitoring the lander’s power level, which has been steadily declining as dust accumulates in its solar arrays. By Monday, October 3, the storm had grown large enough and was kicking up so much dust that the thickness of the dusty haze in the Martian atmosphere had increased by nearly 40% around InSight. With less sunlight reaching the lander’s solar panels, its power dropped from 425 watt-hours per Martian day, or sun, to just 275 watt-hours per sun.
Lately, InSight’s seismometer has been operating for about 24 hours every other Martian day. However, with the decline in solar power, there is not enough power generation to fully charge the batteries each sun. In fact, at the current discharge rate, the lander could only operate for several weeks. Therefore, to save energy, the mission will turn off InSight’s seismometer for the next two weeks.
“We were at the bottom of our ladder when it comes to power. Now we’re on the ground floor,” said InSight project manager Chuck Scott of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) south of California “If we can get out of this, we’ll be able to continue operating through the winter, but I would worry about the next storm that comes.”
Based on predictions of how much dust from its solar panels will reduce its power generation, the team had estimated that InSight’s mission would end between the end of October this year and January 2023. Some time ago which has passed its main mission, the landing is near. until the end of its extended mission, performing “extra science” by measuring earthquakes, which reveal details about the red planet’s deep interior.
The beige clouds seen on this global map of Mars are a continent-sized dust storm captured on September 29, 2022 by the Mars Climate Imager camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. NASA’s Perseverance, Curiosity and InSight missions are labeled, showing the great distances between them. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Studying Martian storms
There are signs that this large regional storm has peaked and entered its decay phase: MRO’s Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which measures the warming caused by sunlight-absorbing dust, sees the growth of the storm slows down. And the dust-raising clouds seen in images from the orbiter’s Mars Color Imager, which creates daily global maps of the red planet and was the first instrument to detect the storm, aren’t expanding as quickly as they once did.
This regional storm is no surprise: it is the third such storm observed this year. In fact, Martian dust storms occur at all times of the Martian year, although more of them—and larger ones—occur during the late autumn and northern winter.
Martian dust storms are not as violent or dramatic as Hollywood makes them out to be. Although winds can blow up to 60 miles per hour (97 kilometers per hour), the Martian air is thin enough that it has only a fraction of the force of storms on Earth. Mostly, storms are messy: they throw dust billowing into the atmosphere, which descends slowly, sometimes taking weeks.
On rare occasions, scientists have seen dust storms grow into planet-encircling dust events that cover almost all of Mars. One such planet-sized dust storm ended 2018 with NASA’s solar-powered rover Opportunity.
Because they run on nuclear power, NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have nothing to worry about in terms of a dust storm affecting their power. But the solar-powered Ingenuity helicopter has noticed the global increase in background haze.
In addition to monitoring storms for the safety of NASA missions on the Martian surface, MRO has spent 17 years collecting invaluable data on how and why these storms form. “We’re trying to capture the patterns of these storms so we can better predict when they’re about to happen,” Zurek said. “We learn more about the Martian atmosphere with each one we observe.”
More information about the mission
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California, manages InSight for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. InSight is part of NASA’s Discovery program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supports spacecraft operations for the mission.
Several European partners, including France’s National Center for Space Studies (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument to NASA, with IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris) as principal investigator. Significant contributions for SEIS came from the IPGP; the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland; Imperial College London and Oxford University in the United Kingdom; and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument, with significant contributions from the Space Research Center (CBK) of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika in Poland. The Astrobiology Center of Spain (CAB) supplied the temperature and wind sensors.
JPL also manages MRO and its Mars Climate Sounder instrument for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space built MRO. The Mars Climate Imager, or MARCI, was built and is operated by Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.