InSight—or less elegantly, the Inland Discovery Mission using the Seismic Investigation, Measurement, and Heat Transport Mission—is a robot NASA’s JPL (with the help of European Space Agency) sent to Mars in 2018.
It’s a pretty simple job. Or as simple as “an extremely complex robot built on Earth and then launched from a rocket into deep space and then landed on another planet“maybe, anyhow. InSight has placed a seismometer on Mars and has spent the past four years reading and interpreting data received from it, passing the time by providing “accurate 3D models of the planet’s interior” and measures “internal heat transfer using a thermal probe called HP3 to study the early geological evolution of Mars”.
In addition to its main role, InSight is also useful because it has a camera attached, allowing it to take some very nice pictures of the Martian surface. Its coldest However, the achievement, at least for anyone not in the hardcore space science field, is the fact that the robot was able—through vibrations detected on its solar panels —recorded the sound of the wind on Mars, the first time that humans have been able to record. never heard the wind from other planet.
So yeah, nice robot! But like any robot sent into space, InSight is running on batteries, and while its solar panels and proper use of systems have helped extend its life, time is running out. come very quickly when it runs out of power and is forced to power off.
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This should be a regular problem. This is a machine, it will stop working, we will all go on with our lives. But someone at NASA had a brilliant/wonderful idea to personify the last days of InSight, and so instead of a press release saying “the machine has stopped working, it has been working fine.” , we have to read this:
Sorry. I just have some Mars dust in my eyes.
I hope, one day soon, we can travel to Mars ourselves. And when we get there, I hope one of the first things we do is find InSight and embrace it.
