A NASA robot sends out one of the saddest tweets I’ve ever seen

InSight – or less elegantly, Indoor Exploration with Seismic Investigations, Geodesy Mission and Heat Transport – is a robot NASA JPL (With help from European Space Agency) It was sent to Mars in 2018.

The job was fairly simple. Or simply as “a very complex robot built on Earth and then launched from a rocket into deep space.” You landed on another planetIt could be, anyway. InSight has put a seismometer on Mars and has been sitting around for the past four years reading and interpreting data from it, killing its time providing “accurate 3D models of the planet’s interior” and measuring “internal heat transfer using A thermal probe called HP3 is intended to study the early geological development of Mars.”

Aside from its main role, InSight has also been useful because it has a camera attached, allowing it to take some great pictures of the Martian surface. that it coolest Still, the breakthrough, at least for anyone not into space science hardcore, is the fact that the robot was able — via vibrations detected on solar panels — to record the sound of winds on Mars, the first time anyone has used them. I ever heard the wind another planet.

So yeah, cute bot! But like any robot sent into space, InSight runs on a battery, and while solar panels and judicious use of its systems have helped pave its life, the time is fast approaching when it will finally run out of juice and have to shut down. .

This should be a matter of routine. This is a machine, it will stop working, and we will all go on with our lives. But someone at NASA had a great/terrible idea to flesh out InSight’s final days, and instead of a newspaper report saying “machine has stopped working, it’s done amazing things,” we have to read this:

Excuse me. I just have some… Mars dust in my eyes.

I hope, someday soon, we ourselves will be able to travel to Mars. And when we get there, I hope one of the first things we do is find InSight, and give it a hug.