NEW YORK – Nasa’s Mars InSight spacecraft is dead.

For months, mission managers have been expecting this as dust accumulated on the lander’s solar panels, blocking the sunlight the stationary spacecraft needs to generate power.

InSight, which arrived on the surface of Mars more than four years ago to measure the red planet’s seismological shaking, was last in touch on Thursday.

But nothing was heard during the last two communication attempts, and Nasa announced on Wednesday that it was unlikely for it ever to hear from InSight again.

“I feel sad, but I also feel pretty good,” Dr Bruce Banerdt, the mission’s principal investigator at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an interview.

“We’ve been expecting this to come to an end for some time.”

He added, “I think that it’s been a great run.”

InSight – the name is a compression of the mission’s full name, Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport – was a diversion from Nasa’s better known rover missions, focusing on the mysteries of Mars’ deep interior instead of searching for signs of water and possible extinct life on the red planet.

The US$830 million (S$1.12 billion) mission aimed to answer questions about the planet’s structure, composition and geological history.

The spacecraft’s seismometer lived up to scientists’ expectations.

It was the first time that quakes have been detected on another planet. (It was, however, not the first off-Earth quakes. During the Apollo missions, Nasa astronauts left seismometers on the moon, and those registered numerous moonquakes.)

As InSight comes to an end, one of the other active Nasa spacecraft on the surface of Mars, the Perseverance rover, is setting the stage for a future mission.

It has started dropping onto the ground 10 tubes containing rock samples that are about the size of a stick of chalk.

Perseverance has been drilling a variety of rocks in the Jezero Crater where it landed.

A follow-up mission still in the planning stages, Mars Sample Return, is to bring the rocks back to Earth for scientists to study in their laboratories. NYTIMES