The Triumphs and Failures of the InSight Probe

On December 24, 2021 on earth billions of people were preparing to celebrate Christmas Eve Meanwhile on Mars it was another cold and dusty work day for NASA's InSight Probe, it arrived on the red planet on November 26, 2018 with the mission of studying earthquakes and the interior of that world.

The InSight is basically a large 360-kilo seismograph, with microphones, various sensors, a robotic arm to deploy the instruments and something very important in order to fulfill the main objective of the mission, a drilling system with which the scientists intended to dig. up to 5 meters underground to introduce a probe with which to measure the heat coming from the planet's core, something very important to know if the heart of Mars is geologically hot and active.

Mars did not make it easy for InSight, the Martian alone turned out to be much harder than expected, in mid-January 2021 NASA declared the mission to drill the surface unsuccessful after numerous attempts, trying various strategies, even making one last attempt with 500 hits of the Hammer Drill, but there was no way, of the five meters they intended to drill they had only managed to reach 40 centimeters.

NASA scientists said they were literally "baffled" by the unexpected properties of the soil, so that in the end they had to consider that objective as a failure, that will be an experience that they will have to take into account for future missions and especially for when humans intend to dig and build structures on Mars.

This was not the only problem for InSight, the Probe takes its energy from two solar panels that have gradually filled with dust between September and October of this year 2022, a huge dust storm the size of a continent was formed, initially It was some 3,500 kilometers away, but the storm ended up reaching the Probe and further reducing its ability to capture energy, which has placed it in an extreme situation.

At present, NASA experts believe that the InSight mission will end in the near future, probably before January 2023, although after that date it may continue to function with some basic system and offer us information on Martian earthquakes.

Because that part of the mission, it has managed to do, that of capturing earthquakes on Mars, it has done very well. InSight has detected 1,318 marsquakes and on December 24, 2021, InSight captured a very special earthquake of magnitude 4. specifically this one in the next video.

The earthquake was caused by the impact of a meteoroid, which is what asteroids of less than 50 meters in diameter are called, which is the news that caused the impact, it is estimated that it could be between 5 and 12 meters in diameter, if Had it entered the Earth's atmosphere, it would surely have exploded several kilometers high, Earth's atmospheric gases act as a phenomenal shield, protecting us from meteoroids and small rocks from space, but the Martian atmosphere is very thin, barely having 1% of the density of the terrestrial atmosphere, so the meteoroid was able to cross it and ended up crashing into the surface, opening a crater about 150 meters wide and 21 meters deep.

This is the first impact recorded since the probe arrived, the impact managed to remove a large amount of surface and sub-surface matter that acts as a "drill" to explore the strata of Mars; a help that we did not expect.