向洞察号火星着陆器说“再见”

On Dec. 18, 2022, InSight did not respond to communications from Earth. As expected, the lander’s power has been declining for months, and it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations. NASA will declare the mission over when InSight misses two consecutive communication sessions with the spacecraft orbiting Mars, part of the Mars Relay Network – but only if the cause of the missed communication is the lander itself. After that, NASA’s Deep Space Network will listen for a time, just in case.

InSight launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on May 5, 2018. After a six-month cruise, InSight landed on Mars on Nov. 26, 2018, and immediately began surface operations at Elysium Planitia, but science data collection didn’t start fully until about 10 weeks after landing. That’s because InSight’s science goals and instruments are very different from other Mars landers or rovers. In some ways, InSight’s science activities were designed to be more like a marathon than a sprint. Over the past four years, the lander data has yielded details about Mars’ interior layers, its liquid core, the surprisingly variable remnants beneath the surface of its mostly extinct magnetic field, weather on this part of Mars, and lots of quake activity.

Learn more about InSight, the first mission to explore Mars’ deep interior.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

2022年12月18日，洞察号没有回应来自地球的通讯。正如预期的那样，洞察号火星着陆器的电力供应几个月来一直在下降，据推测洞察号可能已经达到了其旅程的终点。当洞察号错过了与火星中继网络的一部分火星轨道航天器的连续两次通信会话时，NASA将宣布任务结束，但前提是失去通讯的原因是着陆器本身。在那之后，NASA的深空网络仍将监听洞察号的通讯一段时间，以防万一。

2018年5月5日，洞察号从加利福尼亚州范登堡空军基地发射升空。经过六个月的巡航，洞察号于2018年11月26日登陆火星，并立即开始在极乐平原（Elysium Planitia）进行地面作业，但科学数据收集直到着陆约10周后才全面开始。这是因为洞察号的科学目标和仪器与其他火星着陆器或火星车非常不同。在某些方面，洞察号的科学活动更像是一场马拉松，而不是短跑。在过去的四年里，着陆器的数据已经提供了关于火星内层、液态核心、几乎消失的磁场表面下令人惊讶的可变残余物、火星这一部分的天气以及大量地震活动的详细信息。

了解更多关于洞察号的信息，这是探索火星深层内部的第一个任务。

影像来源：NASA/JPL-Caltech