NASA’s InSight lander, which touched down on Mars in November 2018, is no longer responding to messages from Earth, signaling the likely death of this historic mission that peered into the interior of another planet for the first time.
In a tearjerker of a tweet written from InSight’s perspective, NASA broke the news on Monday that the lander is running low on power due to dust buildup on its solar panels, and that it would be “signing off soon.”
NASA will continue to try to contact InSight, but the lander’s latest image is likely our last look at its location near the Martian equator, where it has listened to the rumbles of more than 1,300 “marsquakes”—the Martian version of earthquakes—over the past four years.
InSight’s demise is not unexpected, as dust has been starving the lander of power for months, but the mission team, and space nerds everywhere, will still mourn the lander as it fades into extraterrestrial oblivion.
InSight—which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport—was the first mission to focus on the mysteries of Mars’ interior. The lander was wildly successful in this goal; its record of marsquakes sheds light on longstanding mysteries about Mars and showed that the planet is more geologically active than previously assumed.
InSight has racked up some of its biggest discoveries during its twilight months, including the detection of the biggest tremor ever recorded on another planet—a magnitude-4.7 marsquake that struck in May 2022. Scientists also recently revealed that InSight detected seismic waves created by a space rock slamming into the Martian surface thousands of miles away from the lander, an event that opened a new window into the evolution of the planet.
While the mission has been mostly successful, InSight also endured frustrating setbacks, especially the failure of an instrument called the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package. This instrument is known as “the mole” because it was designed to burrow some 16 feet into the Martian surface, far deeper than any previous mission. Those plans were scuttled when the mole simply couldn’t get any traction in the dirt at the landing site, eventually leading the mission team to give up at a depth of just an inch.
In addition to the mole and a seismometer, the lander carried two cameras that snapped beautiful images, a radio instrument that tracked Mars’ rotation, a weather station, and a retroreflector that will live on as a beacon for future missions.
So as InSight slips into serene darkness over the holidays, raise a glass to the mission that gave us our first glimpse into the inner workings of another planet by eavesdropping on the hidden vibrations of the Martian underworld.