InSight – or, less elegantly, the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport mission – is a robot that NASA’s JPL (with the help of the European Space Agency) Sent to Mars in 2018.
His task was fairly simple. Or as simple as “a highly complex robot built on Earth and then launched into space by a rocket landed on another planet“It can be anyway. InSight has placed a seismometer on Mars and has spent the past four years reading and interpreting the data it receives, killing time providing “accurate 3D models of the planet’s interior” and studying “internal heat transfer with a thermal probe called HP3 to “study the early geological evolution of Mars”.
Aside from its main role, InSight was also useful because it comes with a camera that allows it to take some very nice photos of the surface of Mars. It is coolest However, an achievement, at least for anyone not in the field of hardcore space science, is the fact that the robot – via vibrations detected on its solar panels – was able to reproduce the sound of the wind on Mars record what was the first time someone had ever heard wind another planet.
So yes, beautiful robot! But like any robot sent into space, InSight runs on a battery, and while solar panels and the judicious use of its systems have helped extend its life, the time when it will finally run out of juice is fast approaching and he is forced to switch off .
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That should be routine. This is a machine, it will stop working, we will all get on with our lives. But someone at NASA had the clever/terrible idea to humanize the last days of InSight, and so instead of a press report stating, “The machine stopped working, it did neat things,” we have to read:
Forgiveness. I’m just keeping an eye on something… Martian dust.
I hope that one day we can travel to Mars ourselves. And when we get there, one of the first things we hope to do is find InSight and embrace it.
