The InSight mission on Mars is becoming one of my favorites, not because of its images or its data, although its data is pretty darn cool. No, it is becoming my favorite because of its engineering team’s ability to keep overcoming problems with creativity in a way that feels like this mission was written by Disney to be some underdog buddy movie. In this mission’s ongoing adventures, the latest chapter includes scientists dumping sand on the lander so the wind would clear the solar panels, and then being able to measure marsquakes that lasted longer than I care to think about.

Let’s break this down. Extremely fine dust had been building up on InSight’s solar panels, and this was causing the lander to have to make choices about what instruments could be turned on. Without a direct means to clean the panels, the engineering team decided to take a risk and be creative. Using InSight’s ever flexible scooper, they shoveled a bit of coarse sand onto the lander and placed it beside the solar panels in hopes that the Martian wind would push the dust across the panels to remove the dust, and this happened! Go, team!

With the ability to gather more light and thus more power, the team powered up the seismometer, and on August 25, detected two quakes at magnitudes 4.1 and 4.2. On September 18, InSight’s thousandth day on Mars, it detected another 4.2 quake that shook for nearly ninety minutes. As someone who lives in California and felt last week’s quake while at Disneyland, I have to say that Mars can keep its quakes.

The September 18 quake is still being studied, but early results on the August 25 quakes indicate that they centered in two different locations, 575 miles and 5,280 miles from InSight. The exact locations are still being sorted, but neither originated in Cerberus Fossae, the site of past marsquakes. It is possible the more distant quake was centered in Valles Marineris, the largest canyon system in the solar system. Here is to hoping the scientists move quickly and we can tell you more about Mars’s active lifestyle in the near future.

More Information

NASA JPL press release