This is likely the final photo that NASA's Mars InSight lander will ever send back to Earth. The robot has been snapping pics and gathering data about the Martian environment since landing on the planet in November 2018 -- and it's been steadily accumulating dust on its solar panels that entire time. As NASA predicted earlier this year, the layer of debris has finally become too thick for the solar panels to operate. The InSight Twitter account officially said goodbye on December 19th with a final image from the surface of Mars. "My power's really low, so this may be the last image I can send," the tweet reads.

NASA's InSight Mars lander is covered in dust in its final selfie, taken on April 24. The following month its robotic arm was put into resting position, aka "retirement pose." NASA's InSight Mars lander is covered in dust in its final selfie, taken on April 24. The following month its robotic arm was put into resting position, aka "retirement pose." The end has long been in sight for InSight, the NASA lander that's been stationed on Mars since 2018.

Quakes aren't unique to Earth – a lander has detected more than 700 of them on Mars. And new research shows that some of them may occur seasonally. The NASA InSight lander, which touched down on the Red Planet in November 2018, brought seismometers and placed them on the surface using a robotic arm. These instruments have been gathering information since shortly after the landing. "It's really cool that we're finding so many marsquakes, and there's so much about this planet that we're …

NASA's InSight lander has measured one of the biggest and longest marsquakes yet, which featured tremors of 4.2 magnitude lasting nearly an hour and a half, the space agency said. The robotic seismometre celebrated 1,000 days on the Red Planet on September 18, when it detected the largest tremor since it arrived at the Elysium Planitia in 2018. The 4.2 magnitude quake equals the largest detected so far on Mars, but on Earth that would be considered'light', with more than 10,000 earthquakes of that level detected every year, feeling like a light rumble that would make dishes shake. The lander was only able to make the measurement after efforts to clear dust from its solar panels earlier in the year - keeping the seismometre operating. The team took a counterintuitive approach to achieving this by sprinkling one solar panel with larger sand grains in the hope wind would blow it across the other panel and result in clearing enough of the dust to allow power to enter the device.

NASA's InSight lander is struggling to retain power as it explores Mars as dust is accumulating on its solar panels, which could result in its mission ending within the next year. The American space agency announced Tuesday that 80 percent of the solar panels are obstructed by dust, leaving less than 700 watt-hours of power per Martian day. It was hoped that winds would clean the lander and allow it to continue to collect seismic data on its extended mission, which was supposed to last until the end of 2022. NASA attempted to remove dust from the top on InSight earlier this month using the lander's robotic arm, which trickled sand near one solar panel with the hopes wind would carry off the panel's dust. NASA's InSight lander is struggling to retain power as it explores Mars due to Martian dust accumulating on its solar panels, which could result in its mission within the next year The death of InSight was discussed at a June 21 meeting of NASA's Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group, SpaceNews reports.

NASA's "mole" on Mars has failed. After nearly two years of attempting to dig the InSight lander's heat probe – nicknamed the mole – into the Red Planet's surface, engineers have finally given up. The InSight lander arrived on Mars in November 2018. Its main purpose is to study the planet's deep interior in order to help us understand the history of the solar system's rocky worlds. The lander has three main instruments to help it do that: a seismometer to catch vibrations travelling through the ground, a radio to precisely measure Mars's rotation and learn more about its metal core and a setup called the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) to measure the heat flowing out of the planet's centre.

Data beamed back to Earth from NASA's InSight lander suggests Mars' crust is composed of three cake-like layers. Anchored near Mars' equator, the robotic lander's super-sensitive seismometer, known as SEIS, has recorded hundreds of'marsquakes' in the past two years. Each quake emits two sets of seismic waves and analyzing the differences in how those waves move has allowed researchers to begin calculating the size and composition of the planet's crust, mantle and core. 'We have enough data to start answering some of these big questions,' Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Bruce Banerdt told Nature. Launched in 2018, the InSight mission marks the first time scientists have peered inside a planet other than Earth.

NASA is running out of options in its mission to get its InSight lander's probe back on track. According to the agency, it will attempt to use a robotic arm attached to its InSight Lander to push down on a probe meant to drill into Martian soil which has struggled to achieve its mission throughout the past year. NASA says the goal is to stop the probe from popping out of its partially dug hole which it has done twice in recent months in addition to almost burying itself. While the act of pushing down on the probe with the arm should be relatively easy, NASA acknowledges that choosing to do so could create problems for the instrument if too much force is applied. The worry is that pushing down with the arm may damage a ribbon-like stretch of wires that attaches to InSight.

NASA's digging probe on the InSight Mars lander is finally making progress again after assistance from the lander's robotic arm helped it gain purchase in the soil. The probe -- dubbed'the Mole' -- began hammering its way into the soil of the Red Planet in March, but after digging a few inches it found itself unable to go deeper. Experts believe that the probe encountered an unexpected layer of cemented soil that wasn't falling into the hole the device had dug. The result was that there wasn't enough purchase between the probe and the surrounding soil for the Mole to push down any deeper. After first trying to compact the surrounding soil with InSight's instrument arm, engineers tried pushing the mole sideways against its hole.

NASA's InSight rover has provided the American space agency with weather reports, images and other interesting findings on Mars – but has struggled to probe its surface. In nearly eight months, the land rover has only dug through 14 inches of the red planet's surface, even though it was engineered to reach at least 16 feet to study how heat escapes from the interior. This blunder has come down to InSight's'mole' heat probe's inability to keep its footing in the soil – NASA believes the device is just bouncing in place. In nearly eight months, the land rover has only dug through 14 inches of the red planet's surface, even though it was engineered to reach at least 16 feet in order to study how heat escapes from the interior InSight, NASA's $1 billion rover, made landing on Mars in November 2018 after traveling through space for seven months. And although it has been a key player in the Mars mission, it has failed to explore the planet's interior.