The Mars rover is nearing the end of its lifespan.

When NASA’s InSight rover first touched down on the surface of Mars in 2018, its solar panels could draw in approximately 5,000 watt-hours worth of power every day, enough to power an electric oven for roughly an hour and a half. However, as time has passed, the rover’s solar panels have become coated in Martian dust, and without any means of cleaning the dust off, the panels have been losing their efficiency. This means that the rover, and by extension the InSight mission, are nearing the end of their lifespan.

“We’ve been hoping for a dust cleaning like we saw happen several times to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers,” said Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator at JPL. “That’s still possible, but energy is low enough that our focus is making the most of the science we can still collect.”

As its energy levels have dropped, the rover went into safe mode near the beginning of May to conserve power. With only about 500 watt-hours of power per day, worsened by dusty skies blocking out the Sun, the rover can only sustain its most essential functions. Over the next several months, the scientists running the mission will be disabling the rover’s seismometer and other equipment, only occasionally checking in on it to see if it remains functional.

“The InSight mission has really just been an incredible mission for us,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. “And it’s given us a glimpse of Mars that we couldn’t get from any other spacecraft in our NASA Mars fleet. Interpretation of the InSight data have really furthered our understanding of how rocky planets form throughout the universe.”