NASA declared the Mars excavator dead Thursday after failing to dig deep into the red planet to take its temperature.
Scientists in Germany spent two years trying to find their heat probe, they named the mud, to drill into the Martian bark. But the 16-inch-long (40-centimeter) device that is part of NASA’s InSight lander couldn’t get enough grip in the red dirt. He was supposed to bury 16 feet (5 meters) into Mars, but he only drilled two feet (about half a meter).
After one last unsuccessful attempt to knock down over the weekend with 500 strokes, the team announced its retirement.
“We gave him everything we have, but Mars and our brave mole are incompetent,” said Tilman Spohn of the German Space Agency, the lead scientist for the experiment.
The effort will benefit future excavation efforts at Mars, he said in a statement. Astronomers may one day have to dig into Mars, according to NASA, looking for frozen water to drink or make fuel, or signs of a microscopic past life.
The design of the moor was based on Martian soil previously studied by spacecraft. That didn’t turn out anything like the clumpy dirt happened this time.
Meanwhile, the French seismometer InSight has recorded nearly 500 Marsquakes, while the sovereign weather station provides daily reports. On Tuesday, the high was 17 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 8 degrees Celsius) and the low was less than 56 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 49 degrees Celsius) at Mars’ Elysium Planitia, an equatorial range.
The lawyer recently received a two – year extension for scientific work, which now lasts until the end of 2022.
InSight landed on Mars in November 2018. It will be joined by NASA’s latest rover, Perseverance, which will attempt to launch a spacecraft on February 18th. The Curiosity rover has been moving away from Mars since 2012.
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