The day is approaching when NASA's Mars InSight lander will fall silent, ending its history-making mission to reveal secrets of the Red Planet's interior. The spacecraft's power generation continues to decline as windblown dust on its solar panels thickens, so the team has taken steps to continue as long as possible with what power remains. The end is expected to come in the next few weeks.

But even as the tightknit 25-to-30-member operations team—a small group compared to other Mars missions—continues to squeeze the most they can out of InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), they've also begun taking steps to wind down the mission.

Here's a glimpse of what that looks like.

Preserving data

The most important of the final steps with the InSight mission is storing its trove of data and making it accessible to researchers around the world.

The ALMA space telescope in the Chilean Andes suffered a cyberattack over the weekend that has downed its website and suspended its work, the observatory announced Wednesday.

ALMA, the world's most powerful telescope for observing molecular gas and dust, studies the building blocks of stars, planetary systems, galaxies and life itself, according to the European Southern Observatory (ESO), its co-operator.

The attack Saturday on ALMA's computer systems did not compromise its powerful antennas or any scientific data, it said on Twitter.

The cyberattack forced the suspension of astronomical observations, left the observatory with limited email services, and its website still offline four days later.

"The threat has been contained and our specialists are working hard to restore affected systems," said the ALMA tweet.

"Given the nature of the episode, it is not yet possible to estimate a date for a return to regular activities," it added.