After spending four years on the surface of the Red planet, NASA’s Mars insight lander is about to turn off. The amount of dust covering the lander’s solar panels has been causing its power levels to decrease for the past several months. Although NASA previously warned that Insight was not responding properly as it couldn’t respond to signals from Earth.
My Power Is Really Low
The insight lander may have reached the prime of its research on Mars, according to NASA. “My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send,” Nasa Insight account posted on twitter recently, indicating the doomsday of the lander. The space agency also issued a warning in November that the lander’s time may be running out as dust continued to gather and choke the Insight’s power.
The Journey So Far
The Insight lander touched the surface of Mars back in 2018. It became the very first spacecraft to reveal more than 13,000 Marsquakes on the Red planet. According to NASA, the most recent Marsquake that Insight detected earlier this year caused the ground to tremble for at least six hours.
