NASA's InSight Mars Lander's Days Are Numbered

On May 4, NASA's InSight lander made a huge discovery, recording the biggest quake ever detected on another world, a magnitude 5 temblor. But InSight's greatest accomplishment may also be its last act; just two weeks later, scientists on the InSight team revealed that the lander's solar panels are now blanketed with dust, which has gradually accumulated since its arrival on the planet. Those panels' diminishing power will likely spell the end of the mission. When the lander arrived on the Red Planet, the panels generated 5,000 watt-hours per sol (a Martian day), but now they're down to about a tenth of that, said Kathya Zamora Garcia, InSight deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at a virtual press conference on Tuesday. The scientists will keep running Insight's seismometer and robotic arm camera full-time for a few more weeks, and will run them for half-days every other sol after that, but they expect InSight's science operations to end this summer, possibly in July.