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The morning A few hours before NASA's InSight probe enters the atmosphere of Mars, approximately 30 Lockheed Martin employees gathered in the company's InSight mission support area in Denver. They all wore the same red buttoned shirt adorned with a mission coat of arms. Someone had glued some red plastic on some of the fluorescent lamps, to give the room a Martian vibe. As the last hours passed before InSight entered the atmosphere of Mars and headed to the surface, there was not much to do except wait and see. s & # 39; worry.
The engineers had sent the landing sequence commands to the spacecraft a few days ago, where they were now sitting aboard like small bombs, waiting for the right moment to run. "We can not use the joystick," says Tim Linn, chief responsible for the entry, descent and landing of the spacecraft. The time required for communications to get from the Earth to the LG is longer than the LG to land on the surface of Mars; everything is preprogrammed.
In California, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, scientists and engineers were involved in mission management and navigation, while Lockheed was in charge of spacecraft operations. This includes pre-sent orders to install the NASA InSight lander safely on Mars. And today's big day: six months after the lander left the Earth, he arrives on the red planet – with a soft plop and not a smash. The team worked hard to make sure this last option would not happen, but you know, it's Mars. It is far and strange, and only about 40% of the spacecraft destined to reach Mars have done so successfully.
Behind Linn's head, on a giant screen, a graph showed InSight's Doppler data, with red and blue squiggles indicating its speed. "At this point, we do not have any problem anymore," he said, looking around the room at the group of desks where team members silently perched in front of their computers. The rounded labels, each with an image of Mars printed in the background, state that different sections of the room are dedicated to ground data systems, fault protection or flight software. Many of the people currently working on the screens have actually helped build the spaceship. Sarah Brandt, an energy systems engineer, spent three months at Vandenberg Air Force Base to help prepare the spacecraft for launch. Today, she says, it feels like Christmas morning. Presents, of course: But also the agonizing expectation in advance.
A lot of spaceflight it is on standby. The nearly 300-kilogram machine was launched in May and has been moving to Mars ever since. InSight – an acronym for "Indoor Exploration Using Seismic Surveys, Geodesy and Heat Transport" – will help scientists understand how rocky planets are formed, here in the solar system, as well as in the rest of the world. universe.
The first hundred million years of the existence of a planet determine many of its more mature personality traits: what is it made of, what is their atmosphere, that a magnetic field envelops them. Mars has preserved the remains of these primitive processes, in a way that the Earth, with its regular geological metamorphoses, does not have.
InSight aims to understand them. It has an instrument that will measure the seismic activity (and will capture the reverberations of meteorite impacts), a kind of thermometer that will be fixed at a depth of 16 feet below the Martian surface and a device that will take stock of the rotation of the red planet. But before these instruments could do their job, they had to make the long trip to Mars, an arduous journey no matter how many times humans sent a spacecraft there.
InSight was pretty safe in the empty space-long, but there was a last mile problem: how to crawl into the atmosphere to land safely on the ground. Lockheed engineers, who led the design and manufacture of InSight, ensured the security of the final phase of its transit, including equipment that slows it from zero to the surface when it enters the atmosphere. .
At the entry point, the InSight heat shield is oriented forward to protect its sensitive parts, while heat builds up to 2700 degrees Fahrenheit. The friction of this leg of the journey slows InSight to less than 1,000 miles at the time. Then a parachute unfolds and the heat shield falls. InSight's three legs appear as turtle members and a radar system looks for the surface. A hull attached to the parachute falls and InSight triggers its thrusters.
No perspiration.
I laugh! At any point in this process, the mission may deviate from the subject, and Lockheed or JPL can not do anything. By the time the engineers learn that InSight has entered the atmosphere of Mars, it will have already landed or crashed.
As time of entry approached, a small blue dot representing InSight intersected closer and closer to a Mars illustrated on a prominent screen at Lockheed. Another display listed the latest milestones of the trip and methodically struck them out. People gathered in front of the screens murmuring.
A jet propulsion laboratory voice came on the speakers in Denver. According to the audio, two small satellites that traveled with InSight, together called the MarCO mission, seemed to work. Their job was to retrieve pings in InSight and return their content to Earth. Radio telescopes on Earth have also collected some emissions from the LG.
Soon, the spaceship was entering the atmosphere. "A power failure is possible during peak hours," warns the voice. An illustrated version of InSight, resembling a bulky coffee filter, bowed on a screen titled "Simulation of Predicted Performance". The Martian horizon is bulging.
The voice read the speed of InSight: 2,000 meters per second. 1000 meters per second. The parachute will be deployed soon, she says. But the only way to know if this has occurred is to monitor a sudden change in speed, a very different Doppler shift in the signal.
So when the voice says "Sudden Doppler Change," the whole piece slams for a brief second, then calms down.
"The radar starts looking for the ground … 30 meters … 20 meters … 17 meters … ready to hit a touchdown."
And then it comes: Touchdown.
The brown blouse engineers started applauding again and quickly became louder. The handshakes gave way to a victory against armament. Woos is transformed into wops at full throats.
Someone, rising above the din, says, "It will never be easier."
More detailed information on InSight's route and physical condition is expected to arrive soon from a spacecraft in orbit around Mars: Mars and Mars Odyssey reconnaissance Orbiter. Odyssey should confirm if InSight has successfully deployed its solar panels, which it will need to keep it alive now that it lands safely. This data will arrive at Lockheed, just one floor below the InSight control room, in another area called Deep Space Mission Operations.
Wall-sized wall planets adorn this ground floor room, where engineers also use spacecraft such as the Spitzer Space Telescope and OSIRIS-REx, a mission back samples Asteroids that will arrive at their destination next month, in addition to these two orbiters of Mars. "How often do we get to Earth?" Explains Beth Buck, Mission Operations Program Manager, who has at least the chance to land on Mars much more often than most people.
After landing safely on InSight, Buck leaves the room and passes in front of a wall covered with InSight art and facts. One of the objects of the gallery whose date is today is November 26, 2018. Landing day. Previously, it had a symbolic meaning – as a kind of motivational poster, perhaps. Now he has acquired his new identity as cold and hard.
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