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Mars NASA

After a Long Struggle With Martian Dust, NASA's InSight Probe Has Gone Quiet (arstechnica.com) 54

NASA's InSight lander has probably phoned home for the last time from the planet Mars. From a report: The space agency said the spacecraft did not respond to communications from Earth on Sunday, December 18. The lack of communications came as the lander's power-generating capacity has been declining in recent months due to the accumulation of Martian dust on its solar panels. NASA said that it is "assumed" that InSight has reached the end of its operations but that it will continue to try to contact the lander in the coming days. Also on Monday, the InSight Twitter account shared a photo with a message saying this was probably the last photo it was sending from Mars. UPDATE 12/21/22: NASA's InSight Mission Officially Over
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After a Long Struggle With Martian Dust, NASA's InSight Probe Has Gone Quiet

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  • Not even a “My battery is low and it’s getting dark” message like we got from Opportunity?
    • Except that was two separate consecutive messages which merely reported battery status and ambient light levels. Humans joined the two together and induced pathos by attributing a second tear-jerking meaning to the whole. This worked far better than HAL repeating "my mind is going, I can feel it. Stop, Dave, stop" as it was slowly lobotomised.

  • Now we know how to defeat the robot armies when they rise against us
  • This is a science article supposedly written by the senior space editor at Ars Technica and he has no concept of what units to use? Solar panels are measured in the power they can produce, which we measure in watts (J/s). Energy in science is measured in Joules if assuming you want to do any math with it. For batteries we measure it in amp * hours * (voltage of the battery) or kwh ( 1 kwh is 3600000 Joules).
    So is this senior editor talking about the power of the solar panels or the battery capacity? Do
    • You're right. They didn't know what they were talking about. While copy-pasting, I suspect they missed the very important unit of time.
  • Seriously, if they have an arm, we need to consider a brush, a small air compressor, or both. Can be used for looking at specimens.
  • Could have a RTG but no, environmentalists are afraid of atoms.

    • by tsqr ( 808554 )

      The most powerful RTG developed to date ( GPHS-RTG) produces just over 300W and weighs 56kg. InSight needs 600W, so you'd need two of these things. That's about 16% of the probe's launch mass; over 31% of its landing mass (presumably the difference is fuel). I couldn't find a weight for InSight's batteries, but typical lithium-ion pouch cells have a power density between 235 - 430W/kg. On the surface, it appears that a solar panel and batteries would be much lighter than an equivalent RTG. RTGs are probably

  • They could have just shut down all the measurement equipment, couldn't they? Or even just shut the whole thing down until the battery reached back to 80% then let it slowly drain without sufficient charge over the days...

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