NASA recently announced it had taken a step for the sedentary probe by commanding its Martian muck-covered InSight lander to tidy up.
Specifically, GIZMODO reported, NASA said it had commanded Insight to drop dirt on top of the dust, and as a result, they were able to manage to remove some of the dirt, boosting the lander's power supply.
The dust, the tech information site said, piled up everywhere. Pushed around by the winds from Mars, it muted the InSight lander, whose solar panels, the source of its power, have been covered in red grime.
Furthermore, the counterintuitive means of clearing the panels could have occurred at a better time. The Red Planet is approaching its aphelion, the most distant point in its orbit from the Sun; therefore, the InSight lander already needed to conserve energy.
Even though the team had prepared for lower-power usage during this point, the work of InSight is running until at least 2022; its collection of data had stalled because of how dirty the solar panels had turned out to be.
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InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is a Mars lander designed to study the "inner space" of Mars: its crust, mantle, and core.
Successful Trick
In a release, NASA said in February this year; the panels were running at just more than a quarter of their full capacity.
The team tried other approaches to remove the dust from the machine sitting on a Martian plain 183 million miles away from any Swiffer.
They attempted to accelerate the motors used to open the table-sized solar panels. By doing so, the team thought the vibrations would shake some dust off but that they did not work.
Observers suggested that the Martian helicopter called Ingenuity could fly over and blow the dust away. The recent trick succeeded, though.
Through the use of the robotic arm of Insight, as described in the website of NASA, the InSight mission team scooped up some dirt from the Red Planet and poured it atop the dust that had settled on the panels.
When they hit the panels, the grains of sediment bounced off, taking tinier dust particles with them, enhanced by Martian winds at 20 miles per hour.
'Dusting-with-Dust' Trick
It was not long ago that things looked unwelcoming for the InSight lander, which arrived on Mars in 2018. In January this year, the lander's Martian "mole" component, primarily an excavator, which was supposed to probe up to 10 feet into the surface of the planet and take temperature readings, was abandoned after it got hopelessly stuck.
One month after, just prior to the arrival of the Perseverance rover on Mars, the InSight team said their decision to postpone some of the work of craft, as the Martian winter meant less power for the machine.
The dusting-with-dust trick has given InSight back roughly 30 watt-hours of energy each Martian day, NASA said.
According to an InSight team member, Matt Golombek, they were not sure this approach would work, but they were delighted it did.
The power bump, explained the team member, does not mean this lander can work at full steam ahead through the Martian winter, although it buys the team a number of weeks more of operation before the shortened hours.
It is worth remembering, too, that the solar panels of InSight were not meant to survive this long in the first place, much similar to Ingenuity, the Martian chopper, and Curiosity which is currently 106 months into its originally-planned 23-month mission.
Related report is shown on Richard Horton's YouTube video below:
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Check out more news and information on Mars in Science Times.
