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.

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.

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 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.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. In case you missed it, NASA JPL landed a robot on Mars. What Thanksgiving is all about: robot arms and flamethrowers.

NASA's latest mission to Mars will study the atmosphere and listen for phenomenons like'marsquakes.' A solar array on the InSight Mars Lander gleams beneath lights being used to test the array's power-generating ability during testing at the Lockheed Martin satellite facility outside Denver in January before being packaged for transport to the launch site in California. VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. Roaring into the predawn sky, the Mars InSight lander launch will be visible to millions of California residents near Los Angeles as it begins its approximately 200-day journey atop a two-stage Atlas V rocket. This is NASA's first interplanetary launch from the West Coast, a decision made in large part because Vandenberg's launch pads are less busy than the ones at Cape Canaveral's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.