InSight station in Elysium Planitia

InSight · 2018 CE – 2022 CE · Mars

InSight station in Elysium Planitia — InSight · 2018 CE – 2022 CE · Mars — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Listen to marsquakes and measure the crust, mantle and core of the planet.

Historical context

Before InSight, the rovers and orbiters studying Mars had concentrated on its surface. InSight, a NASA lander led from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory by Bruce Banerdt, carried a seismometer from the French space agency and a heat probe from the German one, and landed in Elysium Planitia on 26 November 2018 to listen to the planet’s quakes and read its interior from them. In four years it recorded 1,319 marsquakes and measured the crust, mantle and core of Mars, until dust on its solar panels silenced it in December 2022.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Down to Elysium

    26 November 2018

    On 26 November 2018, after a journey of almost seven months and 485 million kilometres, InSight struck the top of the Martian atmosphere at about 19,800 kilometres an hour. Its aeroshell, a parachute and its descent thrusters brought it down onto three legs in about six and a half minutes. The signal confirming the touchdown reached the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at 19:52:59 Universal Time, after some eight minutes in transit from Mars.

  2. A deliberately dull plain

    19 December 2018

    On 19 December 2018 the robotic arm lifted the seismometer off the deck and set it on the ground directly in front of the lander, 1.636 metres away, about as far as the arm could reach. NASA called it the first time a spacecraft had robotically placed a seismometer on the surface of another planet.

  3. Listening to a planet

    6 April 2019

    On 6 April 2019, on sol 128 of the mission, the seismometer recorded the first trembling that appeared to come from inside the planet rather than from the wind above it. It was too small to reveal the interior, but Bruce Banerdt said it officially kicked off a new field: Martian seismology.

  4. The mole that could not dig

    2020 CE

    The heat probe, a self-hammering spike forty centimetres long nicknamed the mole, was meant to drive itself as far as five metres down. It stuck on 28 February 2019, its first day of hammering, and two years of work with the lander’s arm buried it only just below the surface.

  5. The largest marsquake

    4 May 2022

    On 4 May 2022, sol 1,222 of the mission, the seismometer recorded the largest quake it ever detected. NASA first estimated it at magnitude 5; a later analysis by the team put it at magnitude 4.7 on the moment scale, five times the seismic moment of the next largest event, with seismic waves still ringing more than ten hours later at long periods.

  6. Dust wins

    15 December 2022

    Month by month dust dimmed the solar panels. InSight last communicated with Earth on 15 December 2022. After it missed two consecutive passes, NASA declared the mission over on 21 December, concluding that its batteries had run out of energy, a state engineers call “dead bus”.

Outcome

1,319 marsquakes recorded and the first seismic measurements of the crust, mantle and core of Mars.

InSight

Geophysical station that listened to the inside of Mars from Elysium Planitia between 2018 and 2022.

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Sources

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