“The situation is getting worse” .. Dust ends the 4-year mission on Mars

 The US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on Thursday that the "InSight" spacecraft, which has been on the surface of Mars since 2018, will run out of power and stop working within 4 to 8 weeks, and scientists talked about details of its observations in its 4-year mission.

What did NASA say?

• In a press briefing, Bruce Banerdt, a planetary physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the principal investigator for the "Insight" mission, said that dust is accumulating on the solar panels that bring energy to the spacecraft, and that "the situation is exacerbated by a dust storm, which is depleting its batteries. ".

• Bannerdt explained that when the power runs out, NASA will lose contact with the spacecraft.

• He added in statements to "Reuters": "Insight has achieved success beyond my expectations. We have determined the thickness of the crust, the size and density of the inner core, and the details of the structure of the outer surface. For the first time, we have a comprehensive and detailed map of the deep interior of another planet, other than the Earth and the Moon."

The "Insight" mission, which helped reveal the internal structure of Mars and its seismic activity, was scheduled to last for two years, but was extended to 4. Insight also revealed that Mars is seismically active, as it detected 1,318 earthquakes.

And two research papers published in the journal "Science" details about the meteorite strikes on the surface of Mars that were discovered by "Insight" in September and December of last year, and the seismic waves resulting from the strikes revealed new details about the structure of the Martian crust and the outer layer of the planet.

Among the objects of particular interest was a space rock between 5 and 12 meters in diameter, which crashed last December 24 in an area called Amazonis Planetia, where it carved a hole 150 meters wide and 21 meters deep. Similar massive bodies enter the Earth's atmosphere about once a year, but they generally burn up in the thicker atmosphere of our planet.