Another glitch plagues NASA’s InSight lander

[Mike Wehner]

• NASA's Mars InSight lander had been providing weather updates from the surface of the Red Planet, but that has abruptly stopped.
• An unspecified glitch has caused the lander's weather sensor system to go into safe mode, and NASA is still trying to figure out why.
• The system may spring back to life with a reboot, but NASA is taking things slowly.

NASA's InSight lander has done a lot of work since it arrived on the Red Planet, but it's perhaps best known for what it hasn't been able to do. The self-hammering "mole" tool the lander is equipped with just hasn't been doing its job. That's a big deal, but the mission is far from a total loss thanks to the abundance of other sensors and instruments the lander has onboard.

Some of those sensors are designed to track the Martian weather, and NASA has even gone so far as to declare InSight the first Martian weather station. You can check on the latest weather on the official InSight website... or at least you could. That was before it stopped working.

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Another glitch plagues NASA’s InSight lander originally appeared on BGR.com on Tue, 25 Aug 2020 at 19:06:41 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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