NASA shared the latest selfie taken by the InSight Mars rover, showing dust-covered solar panels mingling with the surrounding regolith. The InSight mission is expected to end this year, and the lander will now use all its remaining power to gather as much scientific data as possible.
At a press conference last week, NASA announced that InSight will likely cease all operations by the end of 2022. The mission’s termination is due to the amount of dust accumulating on the solar panels, and this blanket limits the amount of power the spacecraft can draw.
InSight has been working on the Martian surface for three years, taking images of the Martian sky and detecting Martian earthquakes using its seismometer. The lander tried for two years to use the “Mole” heat probe to dig up the Martian surface, but its piercing tip got stuck in the spongy soil. Earlier this month, the lander recorded the largest known seismic activity yet on another planet, a magnitude 5 earthquake that occurred somewhere in the interior of Mars.
This latest selfie was taken on April 24 and shows the amount of dust accumulated on the spacecraft’s solar panels.
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