Twilight is closing in on NASA’s Mars InSight lander — a robotic seismology lab that has been studying the interior workings of the Red Planet since November 2018.
On Tuesday (Dec. 20), NASA announced in a statement (opens in new tab) that InSight failed to respond to routine communications from Earth. This is an alarming, though unsurprising, sign that InSight may finally be dead after months of declining power supplies.
“My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send,” the official InSight Twitter account (opens in new tab) tweeted on Dec. 19 along with a dust-covered selfie. “Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will — but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me.”
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