Dust caused the death of NASA's Mars InSight lander. For months and months, the robot, built to study the tectonic activity on the Red Planet, has been running on less and less power as its solar power array began to disappear under a thick blanket of dust. NASA declared the mission dead on Wednesday after not hearing from the landers for days.
After landing in the flat, seemingly uninteresting Elysium Planitia basin, InSight exceeded its expected mission duration by 2 years. Many wondered if anything could have been done to save the robot, which had been delivering ground breaking science about the internal life of Mars.
NASA's Mars InSight lander has lost power.
NASA explained the trade-offs faced by engineers when designing a mission for the notoriously dusty Mars in a thread posted about six weeks before InSight's final demise.
People often ask if I have a way to get rid of myself. The short answer is this, and it's a fair question. A system like that would have added a lot of costs. The most cost-effective way to meet my goals was to bring solar panels large enough to power my whole mission.
Space agencies try to avoid the dust storm season on Mars when they sendlanders to the planet. Most of the recent landers and rovers made it through several dust storm seasons on Mars. The rover has been on Mars for 11 years and has seen a lot of dust storms. The rover found out how seasonal winds and dust devils help keep it going for longer by measuring the amount of dust on its deck and sensor. When it came to Mars' natural cleaning aid, InSight was rather unfortunate.
Dust devils are known to clean NASA's older generation of Mars rovers. Opportunity exceeded its designed three-month lifetime dozens of times. Dust devil sweeps and wind-generated cleaning events played a big part in that record-breaking mission. The record-breaking journey of discovery ended with a huge dust storm in 2019.
InSight seemed to have been in a particularly unfavorable position for dust removal according to Mike Williams, Chief Engineer at Airbus Defence and Space.
Williams agrees that NASA's approach of outsized solar panels is the safest and cheapest way to protect Mars-exploring spaceships from dust. There is plenty of time for the company to add a dust defense capability. Russia's invasion of Ukraine led to the suspension of the mission. The planned September launch was canceled and the rover is being stored in a clean room.
Williams told Space.com that altering the array to be able to manage the lower amount of sunlight that reaches them is the best and simplest solution. It's the least complex level. The lowest risk is due to the fact that it requires the least number of subsystems. That's the best way to go about designing a mission.
Williams said that when the ExoMars mission was first conceived, engineers considered a number of dust cleaning technologies. They decided that the rover didn't need to self- clean. They are rethinking their approach again because of the new launch date.
Williams said that they are considering reinstating some of that capability. We could use a tilted solar panel to get rid of the dust. The panels would be pointed more efficiently at the sun.
NASA's engineers have to reconcile with the fact that the rover will eventually succumb to dust, and won't be disappointed if it lasts only a little longer. They hope that the weather on Mars will help them.
Williams said it was the way it went with space missions.
NASA tried to help the lander remove some of the dust in the final months of its life even though it wasn't built to do that.
The ground controllers ordered the robotic arm to sprinkle sand on one of the panels. The wind picked up some of the dust as it blew across the panel, which reduced the thickness of the dust blanket.
According to a NASA statement, the landers gained about 30 watt-hours of energy per sol.
Nature won. It always does, as it always does. The fight didn't stop InSight from going down.
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