Can we save the robots of Mars from death by dust?

NASA’s Mars InSight lander slowly died of dust last week. For months and months, the robot, built to study tectonic activity on the Red Planet, ran on less and less power as its 25-square-foot (4.2-square-meter) solar array gradually disappeared under a thick blanket of dust. . On Wednesday, Dec. 21, NASA announced that it hadn’t heard from the lander in days, officially declaring the mission dead.

Insightwhich landed in the flat and seemingly uninspiring basin of Elysium PlanitiaSouth of Marchequator in November 2018, exceeded the planned duration of its mission by two years. Still, many have asked if anything could have been done to save the otherwise perfectly healthy robot, which had provided groundbreaking science on the internal life of mars.

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