NASA Declares Mars Lander InSight's Burrowing 'Mole' is Dead
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
NASA declares Mars lander InSight's burrowing 'mole' is dead:
Here's to all the plucky machines that have tangled with Mars and ultimately lost. Goodbye, Opportunity. Godspeed, Beagle 2. We hardly knew you, Schiaparelli. And now we must bid farewell to the "mole" part of NASA's InSight lander mission.
The lander itself is fine and healthy and still studying marsquakes, but the mole's efforts to dig into the red planet have been stymied every step of the way. On Thursday, NASA announced the end of the mole's journey.
[...] "We've given it everything we've got, but Mars and our heroic mole remain incompatible," said HP3 principal investigator, Tilman Spohn of the DLR. "Fortunately, we've learned a lot that will benefit future missions that attempt to dig into the subsurface."
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