NASA’s spacecraft InSight, which has been on Mars for a long time, has safely emerged from the safe mode it had to enter after an intense dust storm on the Red Planet. Solar-powered InSight, designed to probe Mars in detail, entered safe mode on January 7 to save power. Then, with a new tweet, it was shared that the vehicle came out of safe mode as the dust storm started to subside. Also, with this tweet, we got the first information about the post-storm situation of the Red Planet.
The tweet is as follows: The sky seems to be clearing the hill, so I exited safe mode and returned to more normal operations. I’ll wait to start doing more science until I know how much power I can generate when the storm subsides.
InSight is back to work
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission, said earlier in the month that InSight will exit safe mode in about a week. This prediction turned out to be almost correct, and the vehicle returned safely to its mission.
The biggest challenge faced by InSight, which landed on the Red Planet in 2018, is that Mars is a dusty planet. The solar powered spacecraft is having a hard time because of this dust; It is currently running on reduced power due to dust accumulation on its panel. While engineers managed to clean the dust from the solar panel using the robotic arm of the land vehicle in 2021, NASA states that such a procedure will become more difficult as its power decreases.
InSight can easily clean the dust on the solar panel, at least for now. But the Red Planet reached its furthest orbital distance from the sun last year, and seasonal dust cycles are also considered a threat. We will look forward to seeing what the InSight tool will do in the future.
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