NASA retires Mars InSight mission after it enters ‘dead bus’ condition
As expected, NASA’s Mars InSight lander has run out of energy, leaving the space agency no alternative but to end the mission.
“Mission controllers at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California were unable to contact the lander after two consecutive attempts, leading them to conclude the spacecraft’s solar-powered batteries have run out of energy – a state engineers refer to as ‘dead bus’,” reads NASA’sThe aerospace agency will keep trying to contact InSight, just in case, but has not heard from it since December 15th. The chances of the lander resuming operations are small.
And getting smaller every day because the cause of its problems – fine dust coating its solar panels and reducing their efficiency, thereby denying its batteries of energy – won’t go away. Not even Martian wind help to keep the panels clean. InSight’s managers devised a cunning tactic to improve the situation: using the lander’s robot arm to pick up soil and pebbles and scatter them on the panels so that their descent would provide a little cleaning action.Mars’ winds couldn’t keep InSight clean, but just three days before InSight was decommissioned the journal
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