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PASADENA, Calif. – March has just welcomed a new robotics resident.
The NASA InSight lander landed safely on the Martian surface today (November 26th), winning the first successful landing on the red planet since the arrival of the Curiosity rover in August 2012. – on the seventh anniversary of the launch of Curiosity.
Signals confirming the landing of InSight arrived on Earth at 14:53. EST (1953 GMT), elicit the joy and relief of NASA mission team members and officials at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the InSight mission. [NASA’s InSight Mars Lander: Full Coverage]
But the tension has not completely dissipated and will not be for a moment. Mission team members will not know if InSight successfully deployed its solar panels before 20:35. EST (0h35 GMT 27 November) at the earliest. Without these extensive bays, the LG can not survive, let alone explore the inside of the red planet like never before – the primary goal of the $ 850 million InSight mission.
The atrocious delay is inevitable. Mars Odyssey of NASA will not be in a position to relay the confirmation of deployment to the control of the mission more than 5 hours after touchdown, said officials of the agency.
If the bays unfold as expected, InSight will join a relatively selected club. Over the decades, less than 40% of all Mars missions have reached their destination, whether it is an orbital trajectory around the planet or its dusty red surface.
A long way to Mars
InSight was launched May 5 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, during the first takeoff of an interplanetary mission from the US West Coast. (The Florida Space Coast is the traditional starting point for such faraway travelers.)
InSight shared its Atlas V rocket ride with two case-size cubesats, called MarCO-A and MarCO-B, which have been on Mars for the past six months. The MarCO duo (whose name is an abbreviation for "Mars Cube One") embarked on a $ 18 million demonstration mission, aimed at showing only tiny gears Spatial can explore the deep space.
MarCO-A and MarCO-B have also played a key role in today's excitement in transmitting InSight data to mission control here at the JPL during the heartbreaking sequence of Entry, descent and landing (EDL) of the LG.
And it was painful. InSight hit the thin Martian atmosphere at around 12,300 km / h (19,800 km / h), nailing it at exactly 12 degrees. If the lander had come steeper than that, he would have burned himself; shallower, and he would have jumped the atmosphere like a flat stone on a pond.
As the LG scoured the Martian sky, its heat shield suffered temperatures of about 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt steel. Atmospheric drag slowed InSight considerably, reaching about 1.7 times the speed of sound. At this point, the LG has deployed its supersonic parachute.
InSight quickly used its small inboard propellers to slow down further, eventually landing in a flat equatorial plain called Elysium Planitia at about 8 km / h. (These figures are based on pre-landing modeling done by the InSight EDL team, actual figures may be slightly different.)
All this happened in just 6.5 minutes – the total InSight journey time in the Martian air, from atmospheric input to touchdown. The landing gear's EDL was a little shorter than Curiosity's famous "7 minutes of terror" experiment, which included a sky-powered crane powered by a rocket that lowered the heavy heavy vehicle onto the Mars surface over cables. (The EDL of InSight mirrors that of NASA's Phoenix lander, who seated near the North Pole of the Red Planet in May 2008. The body of InSight is also heavily reliant on Phoenix, the two undercarriages were built for NASA by the aerospace company Lockheed Martin.)
MarCO-A and MarCO-B did not follow InSight on the surface. The Bantam probes flew right over Mars, their work done and their place in history as the first cemented interplanetary cubesats. [NASA’s Mars InSight Lander: 10 Surprising Facts]
"We believe this technology is globally very interesting and we have really shown something unique in the deep spaces that will allow us to pursue future missions in a compact and efficient way," said Cody Colley, Mission Manager. at MarCo-A, here. yesterday (25 November) during a press conference preceding the landing.
Their work is Probably finished, I should say: it is possible that MarCO-A and MarCO-B observe an asteroid or other celestial body if their trajectory brings them close enough and if the funding of an extended mission is granted, John Baker, head of the NASA's program office for the MarCO mission, said Space.com.
Probe the Martian interior
As attractive as the landing was, it was only the prelude to the main event – the scientific work of InSight on the Red Planet.
Over the next two Earth years, the LG will examine the interior structure and makeup of Mars with unprecedented details. To do this, InSight will use two main scientific instruments: a thermal probe that will squat up to 5 meters below the Martian surface and a series of three seismometers of incredible precision, in search of "marsquakes", "strikes of meteorite and other jolts.
"Incredibly accurate" does not make these seismometers justice, in fact.
"They can see vibrations of an amplitude about the size of an atom – maybe a fraction of an atom," said the chief investigator. InSight, Bruce Banerdt, also from JPL, at the press conference the day before.
The sequence of seismometers is thus enclosed in a vacuum chamber, in order to minimize the disturbances that can spoil the data. In late 2015, the mission team detected a leak in this room. The leak was corrected, but not in time for the launch of InSight in March 2016, as originally planned. The windows of launching missions on Mars succeeding only once every 26 months, the lander had to wait until last May to take off.
The science team will also track InSight's position in space using 789 books. (358 kilograms) the communication equipment of the LG. This information will allow scientists to measure the slight flicker of the axis of rotation of Mars, which will also help them to better understand the core of the planet, NASA officials said.
Together, all this data will give scientists an unprecedented look inside the red planet.
"It's the goal of the InSight mission: to map the interior of Mars in three dimensions, so as to understand the interior of Mars and to understand the surface of Mars," said Banerdt.
And scientists can use Mars as a sort of laboratory to understand how rocky planets are formed, he added. Indeed, the bowels of the red planet are more or less frozen on the spot since the formation of Mars, about 4.5 billion years ago. We can not consider the Earth as a time capsule in this way, because plate tectonics, mantle convection and other processes have constantly agitated the interior of our planet.
InSight (abbreviated as "Indoor Exploration Using Seismic Surveys, Geodesy and Heat Transport") has an unusual degree of international cooperation. The thermal search probe was provided by the German Aerospace Center and CNES, the French space agency, led the consortium that developed the seismometer suite. [Mars InSight: NASA’s Mission to Probe Red Planet’s Core (Gallery)]
"A mission in slow motion"
Do not expect InSight to dazzle you with pretty pictures. The mission is not interested in cold surface features, which explains its landing on Elysium Planitia; the plain is smooth and flat with a shortage of rocks, increasing the chances of a safe landing (and burrowing thermal probe capable of penetrating deep into the Martian land). And InSight is a lander, not a rover, so all the pictures taken during his mission will represent the same terrain.
It will also take some time for the spacecraft to be operational on Mars. InSight will use its robotic arm to place the thermal probe, the suite of seismometers and a weather screen (which will surround the seismometers) on the ground.
No other mission on Mars has used such a deployment of instruments – the scientific apparatus tends to be attached to the bodies or arms of the Red Planet satellite – and the InSight team wants to be sure of doing things right . So, once they have discovered the Martian environment of InSight, they will practice deployment again and again using a Bench Lander here at JPL.
The actual deployment will probably not happen until two or three months, said Banerdt. And it will still take about a month to calibrate the instruments to use on the red planet.
So it will take at least six months for the InSight team "even to get an idea of what we are looking for," Banerdt said. And it will probably take about two years or so at the mission to get a detailed insight into the interior of the Martian planet.
"Once on the surface, InSight becomes a mission in slow motion," said Banerdt.
Editor in chief of Space.com Tariq Malikcontributed to this story. Mike Wall's book on the search for extraterrestrial life, "Over there"(Grand Central Publishing, 2018, illustrated by Karl Tate) is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally published on Space.com.
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