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Mankind may be in years before setting foot on Mars, but the Red Planet is still transformed into a park of monuments for our species. Rovers and landers – some still active, some having completed their functional lives – dot the surface and orbits cross the sky above. On November 26th at 2:47 pm EST, another machine is about to join the growing fleet. She will be less concerned about what's happening on or above Mars and more about what's going on there.
As with all recent Mars missions, NASA will transmit the landing sequence from Mission Control to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena; TIME will carry the flow as you go. Surveillance parties will be held throughout the country, including Times Square in New York; Annex to the Smithsonian National Museum of Air and Space in Chantilly, Virginia; and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.
Launched last May on a 270-million-kilometer arc route to Mars, the new addition to the Martian family is known as the March InSight Lander. This name is part of a series of resolutely hard-nosed but nevertheless illuminating NASA spacecraft acronyms – in this case, "Inland Exploration Using Seismic Surveys, Geodesy and Heat Transport". (Selective capitalization is, in all fairness, an improvement over 2004 The Mercury MESSENGER mission, which corresponds to the MErcury Surface Space ENvironment mission, GEochemistry and Ranging.
Yet the clumsy name hides an agile ship. InSight weighs only 1,530 lb., a fuel and protective spray designed to help it survive after a dive into Mars' tenuous atmosphere. It measures only 33 to 43 inches in height, depending on the compression of its three slender legs after landing. The main body of the spacecraft is only 5 feet wide, with no solar panels deployed. But NASA engineers have collected a lot of scientific data in this relatively small package.
The spacecraft is equipped with a seismometer that uses half a dozen different sensors to measure planetary disturbances in a range of frequencies; a motion and sweep sensor that detects anomalies in the rotation of Mars; and, more importantly, a deep thermal probe, that a robotic arm will sink to a depth of up to 16 feet into the planet's surface, much deeper than any other spacecraft has not yet dug. In addition, InSight does not travel alone. Two suit-sized CubeSats satellites trail behind them during their eight-month trip to Mars. They were deployed by the same rocket that launched InSight. Essentially proof-of-concept technologies, they are intended to test the practicality of such mini-ships during missions in deep space. Although they are not essential to the overall mission, if they work as they should, they will help the radio to restore InSight data as it descends and lands before it can. passage in March and their exit in space.
As with all missions on Mars, the landing will be the hardest part, the spaceship resting on aerobics, a parachute system and rocket engines to land gently on the surface. At least, the landing site itself will present few challenges. The most interesting parts of Mars, geologically, are the most dangerous: areas with craters, mountains or canyons, and other landers went there. But InSight's instruments can collect reliable data wherever they are on the surface. The satellite is therefore Elysium Planitia, a vast plain north of the equator, NASA nicknamed "the largest parking on Mars."
NASA has the merit that its map of the landing site indicates the location of previous Martian landers: Viking 1, Viking 2, Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity. At the moment, Curiosity is still at work; The opportunity may be, although NASA has had no contact with the old rover since last June. InSight should work for at least two years, after which it will remain silent. Her time on Mars will be relatively fleeting, but the knowledge she conveys about planetary parents closest to the Earth will continue.
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