InSight Module Silenced Forever
The mission team cannot contact the lander, which was studying the interior of the Red Planet. The agency will continue to listen for signals “just in case”, but notes that the likelihood of this happening at this point is “considered unlikely.”
NASA broke the news of InSight’s impending demise on Monday by posting on Twitter the last selfie of the lander taken on April 24, 2022. Since arriving on the Martian surface in 2018, InSight has been slowly accumulating dust on its solar panels.
“The charge in the lander has been decreasing over the past few months, so we believe that the life of InSight has come to an end. The last time the mission successfully contacted the device was on December 15, 2022,” NASA said in a statement.
Before falling silent forever, the InSight spacecraft managed to send its last photo from Mars back to Earth. It shows the Martian horizon and the probe’s seismometer, as well as a robotic arm.
