https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/news-and-events/news/
8 Jan 2021
Two missions, Juno and InSight, have been given extended missions. Juno’s mission is now extended to September 2025. This extension will include close flybys of Ganymede, Europa, and Io. InSight’s mission is extended two years to Dec 2022. InSight’s extended mission will focus on producing a long-duration, high quality seismic dataset. Continued operation of its weather station and burial of the seismic tether using the spacecraft’s Instrument Deployment Arm (IDA), will contribute to the quality of this seismic dataset.
14 Jan 2021
InSight gave up on trying to get it’s heat flux experiment down to the required depth. After a year’s effort, it had only managed to go down about 3 cm instead of the necessary 40 cm. The soil has the weird double property of clumping and frictionlessness.
12 Feb 2021
Winter woes. Reducing the science workload over the winter months.
Despite InSight detecting hundreds of passing dust devils, none has been close enough to clean off those dinner-table-size panels since they unfurled on Mars in November 2018. Today, InSight’s solar arrays are producing just 27% of their dust-free capacity. That power has to be shared between science instruments, a robotic arm, the spacecraft’s radio, and a variety of heaters that keep everything in working order despite subfreezing temperatures. Since the windiest season of the Martian year has just ended, the team isn’t counting on a cleaning event in the coming months.
Mars is currently moving toward aphelion, the point in its orbit when it’s farthest away from the Sun. That means the already-weak sunlight on the Martian surface is growing even fainter, reducing power when InSight most needs its heaters to stay warm. Mars will start approaching the Sun again in July 2021, after which the team will begin to resume full science operations.
1 Apr 2021
NASA’s InSight Detects Two Sizable Quakes on Mars.
NASA’s InSight lander has detected two strong, clear quakes originating in a location of Mars called Cerberus Fossae – the same place where two strong quakes were seen earlier in the mission. The new quakes have magnitudes of 3.3 and 3.1; the previous quakes from two years ago were magnitude 3.6 and 3.5. InSight has recorded over 500 quakes to date, but because of their clear signals, these are the four best quake records for probing the interior of the planet.
Over the course of the mission, we’ve seen two different types of marsquakes: one that is more Moon-like and the other more Earth-like. The seismometer, called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), is sensitive enough that, even while it is covered by a dome-shaped shield to block it from wind and keep it from getting too cold, wind still causes enough vibration to obscure some marsquakes.
Temperatures near the InSight lander swing from almost minus 100 degrees Celsius at night to 0 degrees Celsius during the day. These extreme temperature variations cause the cable connecting the seismometer to the lander to expand and contract, resulting in popping sounds and spikes in the data.
So the mission team has begun trying to partially insulate the cable from the weather. They’ve started by using the scoop on the end of InSight’s robotic arm to drop soil on top of the domed Wind and Thermal Shield, allowing it to trickle down onto the cable. That allows the soil to get as close to the shield as possible without interfering with the shield’s seal with the ground. Burying the seismic tether is one of the goals of the next phase of the mission, which NASA recently extended by two years, to December 2022.