Australian scientists to help InSight study Martian geology



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The space shuttle InSight approaches Mars in the concept of this artist. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

AAfter a seven-month trip and a dramatic incursion into the atmosphere of Mars, the NASA InSight lander safely landed and began operations.

Falling into the atmosphere at over 19,000 kilometers an hour, the last mission to Mars landed safely Monday morning. His landing was broadcast on Earth in near real time by two satellites that ran over there to cover the event.

Associate Professor Alan Duffy, a research fellow at the Astrophysics and Computing Center at Swinburne University of Technology, said that the successful landing was a colossal feat.

"Landing on the red planet is difficult. Almost as many missions on Mars have failed. A successful landing on Mars after seven minutes of terror including supersonic aerodromes, parachutes and jet firing will be NASA's first mission to the surface in nearly 10 years and is a big problem, "he said. -he declares.

NASA's internal exploration mission using seismic surveys, geodesy and heat transport (InSight) will be to dig below the surface of Mars, taking measurements of temperature and seismology to better illuminate the environment. 39, activity of the instruments.

Katarina Miljkovic is a CRA DECRA Fellow at Curtin University. C & # 39; s is an Australian researcher named InSight collaborator, alongside Phil Bland and Curtin PhD students.

Miljkovic will build numerical simulations of impact events for meteorite impacts and atmospheric fireballs.

On November 26, 2018, NASA's InSight Mars lander acquired this image with its robotically mounted Instrument Deployment Camera (IDC) mounted on the arms. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech Image.

"InSight is different from previous missions on Mars. This is not a rover or an orbiter. It is a geophysical station to be placed on the surface with pbadive instruments that will detect the inner structure, "she said.

"The goal is to understand how Mars has formed, how it has differentiated and how it differs from our planet. In the end, this will contribute to the knowledge of the formation of all rocky planets. "

InSight's Mars mission trip and ongoing communications will also be supported by the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC), which is managed by CSIRO on behalf of NASA.

InSight broadcast its first transmissions and images to Earth and began the initial operations of its two-year mission.

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