Some four years after first landing, InSight has seen its power drastically decline in recent months due to dust settling on its solar panels. The spacecraft now is expected to shut down within the next six weeks, bringing the mission’s science to an end.
But until its eventual demise, the probe is still making discoveries, including what led to a large quake that occurred in December last year.
The quake, which is now thought to be have been caused by a meteoroid, was showed to have surface waves – a kind of seismic wave that ripples along the top of a planet’s crust. Nasa scientists have used the big impact and resulting waves to study the structure of Mars’ crust.
The meteoroid is estimated to have spanned 5 to 12 metres – small enough that it would have burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, but not in Mars’ thin atmosphere, which is just 1 per cent as dense as our planet’s.
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