NASA shares end plan for under powered Mars In Sight lander

NASA's InSight lander has already recorded Martian earthquakes, surpassing its primary mission. The accomplished machine is now entering its final days as dust continues to coat its solar panels. On Tuesday, NASA laid out an expected timeline for InSight's end.

On a conference call, InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt said the lander "will soon reach the end of its scientific life." The dust-coated solar panels forced the lander to operate on an extremely limited power supply.

The team is prioritizing powering the seismograph, which recorded a magnitude 5 "monster earthquake" in early May. NASA hopes the seismometer will continue to operate until the spring of 2022. Due to current power constraints, it will likely be shut down sometime in July as InSight reaches the end of its science mission. NASA expects to end all InSight operations by the end of 2022.

InSight arrived on Mars in late 2018. When not covered in dust, these solar panels generate enough electricity to run an electric oven for 1 hour and 40 minutes each Martian day. Now, that's down to about 10 minutes. NASA had hoped for a "dust devil" to show up to clear dust off the lander's solar panels to help boost its power, but that didn't happen. Unpredictable weather on Mars could change the schedule.

InSight will spend some effort tucking its movable arm into a "retirement position" that lets its cameras see what's going on in the seismometer. Once the seismometer is turned off, InSight will occasionally take pictures and communicate with Earth until the battery is too low to continue.

While the end of the mission can be a sad time, Banerdt said "there wasn't a lot of pessimism on the team" because InSight still has a lot of work to do. The recent Martian quake -- the largest ever detected on another planet -- shows that the lander still has the ability to provide important data even as its mission draws to a close.

InSight's successful mission helped scientists map the planet's interior for the first time. "It gave us a view of Mars that we couldn't get from any other spacecraft in NASA's Mars fleet," said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division.