HiRISE caught a glimpse of the NASA’s retired InSight lander, documenting the accumulation of dust on the spacecraft’s solar panels. In this image taken on 23 October 2024, InSight’s solar panels have acquired the same reddish-brown hue as the rest of the planet.

After touching down in November 2018, the lander was the first to detect the Red Planet’s Marsquakes, revealing details of the crust, mantle, and core in the process. Over the four years that the spacecraft collected science, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which led the mission, used images from InSight’s cameras and MRO’s HiRISE to estimate how much dust was settling on the stationary lander’s solar panels, since dust affected its ability to generate power.

“Even though we’re no longer hearing from InSight, it’s still teaching us about Mars,” said science team member Ingrid Daubar of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. “By monitoring how much dust collects on the surface – and how much gets vacuumed away by wind and dust devils – we learn more about the wind, dust cycle, and other processes that shape the planet.” (Read more at NASA.gov)

Written by: Andrew Good (JPL Media)  (18 December 2024)