About this story
ECHO: abandoned, but not forgotten
When a mission ends, the machine usually stays where it worked. ECHO tells the story of two of those explorers: the seismometer Apollo 11 left on the Moon in 1969, and NASA’s InSight lander, which listened to Mars from 2018 to 2022. It follows Maya and Adam, two imagined astronauts in the year 2100, as they visit InSight and learn what it discovered.
What’s real and what’s imagined
How to explore
- On the second page, pick Watch it, the Short story or the Full story. Watch it is a three-minute film of the key moments, read aloud by your browser’s voice, with real photos and the real marsquake sound; scroll, press a key or tap to stop it. The short story keeps the key scenes and passes quickly over the others. If you pick nothing, you get the full story. Come back to that page any time to switch.
- Press Play (or P) to watch the story like a film, slowly enough for young readers. When a card says Your turn, Play waits until you’ve done it (or press Skip). Scroll or press a key to take over.
- Scroll or swipe to move through the story, at your own pace. Scrolling back rewinds it.
- Press → or ←, or use the arrows at the bottom of the screen, to step one scene at a time. That’s handy for presenting.
- Jump to any chapter from the top bar.
- Less motion swaps camera moves for gentle fades. Text version shows the whole story as one page.
Sources
The marsquake recording
The seismogram, the sound and the “find the waves” activity in the “biggest marsquake” scene use InSight’s real SEIS data for marsquake S1222a (May 4, 2022). This is how we made them:
- We downloaded 70 minutes of data, from 23:17:07 UTC, recorded by SEIS’s very broadband sensors at station XB.ELYSE (20 readings a second), from the EarthScope (IRIS) data archive.
- We used the instrument’s published response to turn its raw counts into how fast the ground moved, in meters per second.
- We combined SEIS’s three tilted sensors into straight up-and-down motion.
- We kept only the shaking between 0.1 and 1 Hz (one wobble every 1 to 10 seconds), and scaled it so the biggest wiggle is 1.
- We drew it as 640 columns, each showing the lowest and highest value in its 6.6 seconds. The sound is the same data played 400 times faster, so the slow shaking becomes a rumble you can hear.
The activity checks your P and S markers against the Marsquake Service’s own picks (Kawamura et al., 2023, in the sources above). The script that does these steps is tools/make-quake-data.py in the project’s code.
Data: InSight Mars SEIS Data Service (2019), SEIS raw data, InSight Mission. IPGP, JPL, CNES, ETHZ, ICL, MPS, ISAE-Supaero, LPG, MFSC. doi:10.18715/SEIS.INSIGHT.XB_2016. Instrument: Lognonné, P., et al. (2019), SEIS: Insight’s Seismic Experiment for Internal Structure of Mars, Space Science Reviews 215, 12, doi:10.1007/s11214-018-0574-6.
Credits
Made for the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2026, for the challenge “Abandoned but not Forgotten.” All illustrations and 3D models are original, made for this site. They are simplified and not to scale. The turning planets and the Mars landing site are drawn in 3D with three.js (MIT License). The real photos from orbit are by NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) and NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona (HiRISE). Typefaces: Fredoka and Nunito (SIL Open Font License). NASA does not endorse this project. Maya, Adam, the ship ECHO and its repair are fiction, and their dialogue is not a quote from NASA.
How we used AI. The planet style reference was generated with ChatGPT (OpenAI). The site’s code and vector illustrations were written with help from Claude (Anthropic), and so was the film’s narration script, which your browser’s own text-to-speech voice reads aloud. Every science fact was checked against the NASA sources listed above, and the marsquake data was processed from the original SEIS archive.