NASA's Mars Lander Refuses to Die Even Though It's Supposed To

Even though it was supposed to die months ago, the little Mars landers is still going strong.

According to Space.com, a series of strokes of good luck have helped the plucky spacecraft stay alive, despite NASA's expectation that it would die within a year.

NASA has been preparing for the demise of the lander since June of 2021. NASA had pushed its demise back again, with an updated prediction that it would be finished by the end of summer, or at the very least by the end of this year.

Operations updates have helped keep InSight alive.

"We have had a bit of Mars weather that's lucky for us, because we haven't been having any big dust storms or anything," Chuck Scott said.

Mars is currently in the middle of a dust storm season that can cause a landers to go without power. Scott says this dust storm season has been calm.

The project manager told the space website that they were expecting the dust storms to cause a problem. "But in looking at the weather this year, the people that forecast that Mars weather, they are not going to see any storms for another couple of weeks."

Despite the warm-for-Mars weather, InSight is in the robotic version of end-of-life care, with its operators reprograming it to die peacefully rather than going into safe mode. Scott said that InSight's power production has decreased over time and is now at a mere one-tenth of its original capacity. The project manager said that once a storm hits, it will go down and eventually take it out completely.

He said there would be no way for it to restart if the battery failed.

It's a miracle that the little landers has held on for this long, but it's also worth celebrating.

NASA's power-starved InSight lander lives a little longer because of good Mars weather.

Humans have already left a huge amount of trash on Mars.