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Popular mechanics
On Monday, a spacecraft called InSight will arrive at Mars and, if all goes well, will land on the surface. Insight is the latest in a long line of probes that explore the planet and carry instruments that will build on what previous spaceships have discovered.
But this satellite is not alone. Its mission is not only to redefine what humanity knows about Mars, it opens new avenues in the way our species explores the solar system.
<p class = "canvas-atom-canvas-text Mb (1.0em) Mb (0) – sm Mt (0.8em) – sm" type = "text" content = "When launched from InSight on May 5, 2018 Two of the size vehicles of a briefcase were stowed on the side of the LG – a pair of Cubesats called Mars Cube One, or MarCO. "Once InSight Deployed a Launcher , both of them are also deployed, "said Tim Linn, Assistant Program Manager of InSight for Lockheed Martin, tells Popular mechanics. "The three spacecraft were flying in essentially the same direction, towards Mars." Data-reactid = "25"> When InSight was launched on May 5, 2018, two suit-size vehicles were stowed on the side of the LG, a pair of Cubesats called Mars Cube One, or MarCO. "Once InSight has deployed a launcher, each of the two MarCOs is also deployed," says Tim Linn , Assistant Manager of InSight at Lockheed Martin. Popular mechanics. "So, basically, the three spacecraft were flying in essentially the same direction, towards Mars."
Now that the trio of spaceships has arrived on Mars, it's official: the small satellite revolution observed in Earth orbit has reached other parts of the solar system.
Mother ship connection
Photo credit: Lockheed Martin
Both CubeSats have proven themselves by going so far. Their list of accomplishments includes becoming the first CubeSats to provide images of the Earth, Moon and Mars; Demonstrate radios, high gain antennas and propulsion; and perform the first course correction maneuvers by CubeSats as they headed for Mars. In short, they proved that this class of small, affordable spacecraft could survive in the great outdoors.
Now is the time for the pair of little cats to do the work they had come to do: relay the InSight data as they enter the atmosphere and the Martian lands. NASA says this "could be a new type of communication capability."
Probes that travel with their own small data relays are obviously more autonomous than single missions. Linn says it is now possible to imagine future missions in which the main spacecraft would act as a kind of mother ship, carrying CubeSats that it will deploy once it reaches its destination.
"It's always terrifying"
Even with the pair of auxiliary telemetry satellites waiting, the end of the landing for Mars InSight will be uncertain for eight minutes, because of the latency of communication over long distances. "It's always terrifying," says Linn.
No conversation with engineers involved in landings on Mars is complete without a warning about the difficulty of the task. There is a large percentage of chess in the world when it comes to landing on the red planet.
The atmosphere of Mars is thin, barely 1% of that of the Earth, which leaves little friction to slow InSight during the landing. "When we get into that 80-kilometer point above the surface, we're moving at about 13,000 kilometers an hour," says Linn. "When we touch the ground, we go about five miles per hour."
High speed is a necessary evil. The process is determined by the location of the landing site and constrained by physics. InSight has an "entry flight path angle" of minus 12 degrees. If it happens too stiff, it will burn. Too shallow, it will come out of the Martian atmosphere.
According to NASA, only about 40 percent of missions sent to Mars by a space agency were successful, but notes that the United States is the only country whose missions have survived. These probes, like InSight, built by Lockheed, have provided useful lessons. The spaceship shares a true engineering heritage with the Mars Phoenix Lander, which landed a decade ago. But no landing is the same, and Insight has more mass and a landing angle very different from that of its proven ancestor on Mars.
"We use Phoenix as much as we can for this type of mission, but because of the unique nature of what we do on InSight, we have had to change a lot," says Linn. .
The vehicle will use various tips to stay safe during the ride, using a parachute to slow down. "We have a heat shield to slow us down, to absorb most of the energy, and we have a parachute to extract a lot more, and to keep us stable when we move from supersonic to subsonic," says Linn. . "And then we have the last 45 seconds, where 12 big thrusters will fire to really land on the surface."
The heat shield is an essential part of the equipment and is the main way to slow down the probe. But the proven heat shield used in previous missions on Mars was not going to be strong enough to handle this input, the main reason being dust.
"We are also in the dust season, because of the time we started and where we wanted to arrive," says Linn. "So we had to increase the thickness of the heat shield. When we return, this dust can take off a large part of our thermal protection system. We are sandblasted by these dust storms. "
Linn calls this a dance in which every step must be correct. "That's what makes him unique," he says. "And everything must be fine. We can not run into one of the systems. "
The discoveries to come
Once the probe has landed, science can begin. InSight is equipped with a set of sensors to measure the seismic activity, the wind speed and the magnetic field of the planet. The most innovative experiment is really cracking the surface of the planet – a drill that will twist 5 meters into the surface to take the first measurements of the geothermal heat flux of Mars.
And this is the object of all this extreme engineering: to discover why two neighboring planets that should be so similar are so different. One lives life, the other a place where life has not been bought, is dead or hides in extreme groups.
"Unlike Earth, which has undergone a lot of plate tectonics, Mars has kept a lot of that information," Linn said. "So we try to look inside, trying to understand crustal kernel, what Mars looks like."
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