Yeah this sent me down a rabbit hole. Apparently "NASA had previously decided to declare the mission over if the lander missed two communication attempts" (https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9321/nasa-retires-insight-mars-la...).

Ah well, nothing wrong with a little space theatre!

So the message was no message?

How do we know the lander wasn't captured by Martians and locked in a faraday cage, in dire need of rescue?

We have other vehicles we could actually probably get cross checks from. Plus, that'd require some serious level of knowledge to fake a foreign species computational responses from little more than non-invasive scans of chips.

...Unless they are that good... and everything we've been sent is a cleverly constructed ruse.

It's clear, there is only one option. Who's up for an expedition?