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NASA hopes to land its first satellite on Mars since Curiosity six years ago Monday afternoon, and an Alabama scientist part of the mission team will hold its breath among locals around the world. until the InSight lander falls safely.
"We'll know pretty quickly if she survived and everything is fine," said Dr. Renee Weber this month from her Huntsville office. "That's when you'll see everyone applauding and kissing."
Mars InSight – the name means "Mars Interior Exploration" (exploration of the interior of Mars using seismic studies, geodesy and heat transport) – should land around 14 hours. CST. He will send a "ping" indicating that he is alive and ready to begin two years of scientific studies.
Landing on Mars is not easy. Only about 4 out of 10 missions sent to the planet have succeeded, and America is the only country to have a mission to survive the landing. What makes Mars so difficult? It starts with a thin atmosphere – 1% of Earth's atmosphere – which means almost no friction to slow down a spacecraft.
NASA will cover the live landing on its website, its social media platforms and NASA's television. Live viewing events are planned across the country, including Huntsville's Space & Rocket Center in the United States.
The landing target is the Elysium PlanitiaAccording to Weber, Mars is close to "a parking lot – a very flat and safe space, without rocks or slopes". It offers abundant light to power the InSight solar panels.
With the help of a seismometer and a heat flow sensor, InSight will be the first spacecraft to be probed under the Martian surface. The probe is designed "to measure the heat flow coming out of the planet," said Weber. "It tells us about the deep structure and the place of the planet in its evolutionary cycle."
Scientists know that Mars is more advanced in this cycle than the Earth. "The planets start out like hot, active, probably melted rock balls, which lose heat by turning into plates and shrink, becoming less active," said Weber.
Scientists believe that Mars and Earth were formed from the same basic "primordial material" more than 4.5 billion years ago. But they have evolved differently, and the question is why.
"Understanding the inner structure of (Mars) helps us understand, by extension, how all terrestrial planets form and evolve," said Weber. "This gives context to the observations we have of the Earth."
Scientists know from photographs that Mars still has geological faults. It does not have any moving plates below the surface like Earth, but Weber said, "We've seen rock falls and landslides that are probably caused by some sort of tremor."
"Being able to show that these faults are still shaking today would be a very big problem," said Weber.
Insight will also observe the impacts of meteorites. If the seismometer can record an impact, this data can be used to refine the models to locate other events on the planet.
One of the most interesting features of the mission is that the InSight data will be publicly available after a period when only the scientific team can consult it.
"The seismic data will actually be incorporated into the same software tools used by ground seismologists to examine seismic data," said Weber. "Anyone who wants it will be able to access IRIS (iris.edu) and request the downloading of seismic data to Mars in the same way that you can request seismic data from Earth."
The path that led Weber to the research center of the National Space Science Center for Technology in Huntsville began with the study of seismology in a graduate school. She began seismology of ocean floor – much used by the oil exploration sector – then had the chance to 'look at the seismic information of the moon.
"I said, 'Yes, that interests me,'" said Weber. "I did not know that there were seismographs on the moon." (There is thanks to NASA's Apollo program.)
Weber did his first postdoctoral research with "with the French team who actually built the seismometer for InSight, and that's how I got involved."
The team proposed the Mars mission in 2010 to NASA's Discovery program. This smaller mission development program for which NASA is funded is managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.
"The team has been trying to get a seismometer on Mars over the last two decades," said Weber. "So it's really the culmination of a whole career in which hundreds of people, probably thousands of people to date, have all pleaded in their careers for seismic missions on other planets."
Weber is part of the scientific team that meets regularly during the mission's opening weeks and months, when decisions are made about maneuvers to be performed by the trade. After that, InSight will remain silent for two years listening to and sending back data to Earth. the
As cool as InSight is, it's only one of many NASA probes reaching their destinations in the great outdoors. They understand:
– The Parker solar probe, which made its first approach to the Sun on November 5, approaching less than 15 million kilometers from the Earth's star and reaching a maximum speed of 213,000 kilometers per hour.
– The OSIRIS-Rex probe is expected to arrive on the far-space asteroid Bennu on Dec. 13 for a year of study crowned by a beacon to collect a sample and return it.
– New Horizons will fly the farthest spacecraft to date, Jan. 1, when it will meet the subject of the Kuiper Belt nicknamed Ultimata Thule.
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