NASA Condolences! The InSight Mars Robot Will Close The Age Of The End Of This Year

JAKARTA - The dust storm on Mars has continued to appear with a larger volume earlier this month, resulting in NASA's InSight landing robot, experiencing another power decline.

In a statement, NASA said InSight's mission appeared to end in the near future due to the ongoing dust storm, thus covering the solar panels that form power containers for the landing robots.

On Monday last week, storms came quite large and carried so much dust that the thickness of the dust fog in the Martian atmosphere had risen nearly 40 percent around InSight. With the reduced sunlight reaching the landing panel, its energy dropped from 425 watts-hours per sole (Mars day), to just 275 watts-hours per sole.

The Seismometer InSight has been operating for about 24 hours daily on Mars. But the decline in solar energy does not leave enough energy to fully charge each sole battery.

Currently, lander robots can only operate for a few weeks. So to save energy, the mission will shut down the InSight seismometer for the next two weeks.

We are at the bottom of the ladder in terms of power. Now we are on the ground floor. If we can ride this, we can continue to operate until winter, but I'm worried about the next storm to come," said InSight project manager Chuck Scott, quoted Monday, October 10.

The team estimates that the InSight mission will end between late October this year and January 2023, based on predictions of how much dust on the solar panels will reduce its power generation.

The lander robot has long surpassed its main mission and is now nearing the end of an extended mission, conducting bonus research by measuring marsquakes, revealing details about the inside of the Red Planet.

Scientists have seen every time a dust storm occurs, it grows around a planet that covers almost the entire of Mars. One dust storm the size of the planet ended NASA's solar-powered Opportunity exploration in 2018.

However, as other explorers on Mars such as NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance are nuclear-powered different from InSight landers, they don't have to worry about dust storms affecting their energy.