NASA's InSight sends signals to Earth after landing on Mars and deploys solar panels – Xinhua

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 27 (Xinhua) – NASA's InSight spacecraft sent signals to the Earth after its successful landing on Mars, indicating that its solar panels are open and capture sunlight on the surface of Mars.

According to a NASA statement released Tuesday, NASA 's Mars Odyssey orbiter has transmitted signals as well as images showing the landing site of InSight.

The deployment of solar panels allows the spacecraft to recharge its batteries every day.

"The InSight team can rest a little easier tonight now that we know that the spacecraft's solar panels are deployed and are recharging the batteries," said Tom Hoffman, InSight's project manager at the lab. of NASA propulsion in Pasadena, California.

He stated that this opened a new exciting chapter for InSight: the surface operations and the beginning of the instrument deployment phase.

According to NASA, the two InSight solar panels measure 2.2 meters wide each. When they're open, the entire undercarriage is about the size of a big 1960s convertible.

The sunlight of Mars is weaker than that of the Earth because it is much farther away from the Sun. But the undercarriage does not need a lot to work. The panels provide 600 to 700 watts on a clear day, enough to keep the InSight instruments in the scientific research phase on the red planet, NASA said.

The panels are modeled on those used with NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, although those in InSight are slightly larger in order to provide more power and increase their structural strength. These changes were needed to support operations for a full year on Mars (two Earth years), according to NASA.

In the coming days, the mission team will detach InSight's robotic arm and use the attached camera to take photos of the ground so that engineers can choose the location of the scientific instruments. of the probe. It will take two to three months before these instruments are fully deployed and return data.

In the meantime, InSight will use its weather sensors and magnetometer to take readings from its landing site at Elysium Planitia, its new home on Mars.

The InSight probe landed safely on Mars on Monday after a six-month, 300-million kilometer (480 million km) trip, to launch its two-year mission to explore the depths of the interior. ;another world.

Launched on May 5, InSight marks NASA's first landing on Mars since the Curiosity rover in 2012 and the first devoted to studying the interior of Mars' depths.