Mars to get its first U.S. visitor in years
InSight ‘robot’ will listen for quakes
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Mars is about to get its first U.S. visitor in years: a three-legged, one-armed geologist to dig deep and listen for quakes.
NASA’s InSight makes its grand entrance through the rose-tinted Martian skies on Monday after a six-month, 300-million-mile journey. It will be the first American spacecraft to land since the Curiosity rover in 2012 and the first dedicated to exploring underground.
NASA is going with a triedand-true method to get this mechanical miner to the surface of the red planet. Engine firings will slow its final descent and the spacecraft will plop down on rigid legs, mimicking the landings of earlier successful missions.
That’s where old school ends on this $1 billion U.S.-Europe effort.
Once flight controllers in California determine the landing site is fairly flat and rock free, InSight’s 6-foot arm will remove the two main science experiments and place them on the Martian surface. No spacecraft has attempted anything like that before.
The firsts don’t stop there. One experiment will attempt to penetrate 16 feet into Mars using a self-hammering nail with heat sensors to gauge the planet’s internal temperature. That would shatter the depth record of 8 feet drilled by the Apollo moonwalkers nearly a half-century ago for lunar heat measurements.
Those astronauts also left behind instruments to measure moonquakes. InSight carries the first seismometers to monitor for marsquakes — if they exist. Yet another experiment will calculate Mars’ wobble, providing clues about the planet’s core.
It won’t be looking for signs of life, past or present.
The spacecraft is like a selfsufficient robot, said lead scientist Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It’s got its own brain. It’s got an arm that can manipulate things around. It can listen with its seismometer. It can feel things with the pressure sensors and the temperature sensors. It pulls its own power out of the sun,” he said.
By scoping out the insides of Mars, scientists could learn how it — and other rocky worlds, including the Earth and moon — formed and transformed over billions of years. Mars is much less geologically active than Earth, so its interior is a tantalizing time capsule.
InSight stands to “revolutionize the way we think about the inside of the planet,” said NASA’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen.
But first, the 800-pound vehicle needs to get safely to the Martian surface. This time, there won’t be a ball bouncing down with the spacecraft tucked inside, like there were for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers in 2004. And there won’t be a sky crane to lower the lander like for the six-wheeled Curiosity during its dramatic “seven minutes of terror.”
“That was crazy,” acknowledged InSight’s project manager, Tom Hoffman. But he noted, “Any time you’re trying to land on Mars, it’s crazy, frankly. I don’t think there’s a sane way to do it.”
No matter how it’s done, getting to Mars and landing there is hard — and unforgiving.
Earth’s success rate at Mars is a mere 40 percent; that includes planetary flybys dating back to the early 1960s, as well as orbiters and landers.
While it’s had its share of flops, the U.S. has by far the best track record. No one else has managed to land and operate a spacecraft on Mars.
This time, NASA is borrowing a page from the 1976 twin Vikings and the 2008 Phoenix, which also were stationary and three-legged.
But wind gusts could send the spacecraft into a dangerous tumble, or the parachute could get tangled. A dust storm like the one that enveloped Mars this past summer could hamper InSight’s ability to generate solar power. A leg could buckle. The arm could jam.
The tensest time for flight controllers in Pasadena, Calif., is the six minutes from atmosphere to touchdown. They’ll have jars of peanuts on hand — a goodluck tradition dating back to 1964’s successful Ranger 7 moon mission.
InSight will enter Mars’ atmosphere at a supersonic 12,300 mph, relying on its white nylon parachute and a series of engine firings to slow down enough for a soft upright landing on Mars’ Elysium Planitia, a sizable equatorial plain.
Hoffman hopes it’s “like a Walmart parking lot in Kansas”: The flatter the better, so the lander doesn’t tip over and so the robotic arm can set the science instruments down.
InSight — Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — will rest close to the ground. Once its twin circular solar panels open, it will occupy the space of a large car.
If NASA gets lucky, a pair of briefcase-size satellites trailing InSight since their joint May liftoff could provide near-live updates during the lander’s descent.
The experimental CubeSats, dubbed WALL-E and EVE from the 2008 animated movie, will zoom past Mars and remain in perpetual orbit around the sun, their technology demonstration complete.
The mission is designed to last one full Martian year, the equivalent of two Earth years.