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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Just one day ago, NASA's InSight probe aimed at a bull hit on Mars, zooming in as an arrow with no return possible.
InSight's journey, which lasted six months and 300 million miles (482 million kilometers), reached its peak on Monday afternoon.
The robotic geologist – designed to explore the bowels of Mars, surface to heart – must go from zero to 200 km / h in six minutes flat because it pierces the Martian atmosphere, pulls out a parachute, launches its descent engines and, hopefully, lands on three legs.
This is NASA's first attempt to land on Mars in six years and everyone involved is naturally worried.
Thomas Zurbuchen, senior scientist at NASA, said Sunday that his stomach was already turning around. The hardest thing is to do nothing, he says, except hope and pray that everything goes perfectly for InSight.
"Landing on Mars is one of the most difficult tasks that users have to accomplish as part of global exploration," said InSight senior scientist Bruce Banerdt. "It's so difficult, it's so dangerous that there is always a very good chance that something is not going well."
The success rate of the Earth on Mars is 40%, each attempt at overflight, orbital flight and landing by the United States, Russia and other countries dating back to 1960.
But the United States has managed seven landings on Mars over the last three decades. With one touchdown, it's an enviable record. No other country has managed to install and operate a spacecraft on a dusty red surface.
InSight could give NASA its eighth win.
It is the shooting of Elysium Planitia, a plain near the Martian equator, that the InSight team hopes to be as flat as a car park in Kansas with little or no rocks. This is not a rock collecting expedition. Instead, the 360-pound (360-kilogram) static undercarriage will use its 6-foot robotic arm to place a mechanical mole and seismometer on the ground.
The self-hammering mole digs 5 meters (16 feet) to measure the internal heat of the planet, while the ultra-sophisticated seismometer listens to possible marsquakes. Nothing like it was tried before at our smaller neighbor, located at nearly 160 million kilometers.
No experiments have ever been robotically moved from the probe to the actual Martian surface. No lander has dug more than several inches and no seismometer has ever worked on Mars.
By examining the darkest and deepest interior of Mars – still preserved from its beginnings – scientists hope to create 3D images that could reveal how the rock planets of our solar system were formed 4.5 billion years and why they turned out so different. One of the big questions is what made the Earth so welcoming to life.
Mars had formerly rivers and lakes; deltas and lake bottoms are now dry and the planet is cold. Venus is an oven because of its thick and jarring atmosphere. Mercury, the closest to the sun, has a positively cooked surface.
According to Banerdt, the global know-how gained through InSight's $ 1 billion two-year operation could even extend to rocky worlds beyond our solar system. The discoveries on Mars could help explain the kind of conditions present in these so-called exoplanets "and their connection to the story we are trying to understand to determine how planets are formed," he said.
Focusing on planetary building blocks, InSight has no life detection capability. This will be left for future rovers. NASA's Mars 2020 mission, for example, will collect rocks that may contain traces of ancient life.
Because it's been so long since NASA's last Martian landing – the Curiosity rover in 2012 – Mars Mania has captured not only space and science communities, but ordinary people as well.
Shows are planned from coast to coast in museums, planetariums and libraries, as well as in France, where the InSight seismometer was designed and built. The NASDAQ giant screen at Times Square in New York will start broadcasting NASA one hour before the scheduled time for InSight at 3pm. Touchdown EST; The same is true of the Udvar-Hazy Center at the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The InSight spacecraft was built near Denver by Lockheed Martin.
But the real action, at least on Earth, will take place at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, home to the InSight flight control team. NASA offers a special 360-degree online broadcast from the control center.
Confirming the landing can take minutes or hours. At a minimum, there is an eight-minute communication delay between Mars and the Earth.
Two suitcase-sized satellites followed by InSight since take-off in May will attempt to relay its radio signals to Earth, with a potential latency of less than nine minutes. These experimental CubeSats will fly over the red planet without stopping. Signals can also go directly from InSight to radio telescopes in West Virginia and Germany. It will take longer to hear NASA's orbiters on Mars.
Project leader Tom Hoffman said he was doing his best to stay outwardly calm as the hours passed. Once InSight telephoned home from the Martian surface, however, he expects to behave like his three grandchildren at Thanksgiving dinner, running like crazy and screaming.
"Just to warn anyone who's sitting next to me … I'm going to let go of my four-year-old child in you, so be careful," he said.
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For full coverage of AP landing by AP: https://apnews.com/MarsLanding
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The Associated Press Science & Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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