insight has landed!
NASA’s highly anticipated INSIGHT lander has finally touched ground on the dry Red Planet
Scientists rejoiced as NASA’s Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (INSIGHT) lander successfully landed on 26 November at Elysium Planitia, bringing about a whole new outlook on investigations of the Red Planet.
After a seven-month, 485-million-kilometre (300-million-mile) journey INSIGHT had to take on the hardest challenge for a Martian lander: reducing its speed through a virtually nonexistent atmosphere for a safe landing. “We hit the Martian atmosphere at 12,300 miles per hour [19,800 kilometres per hour], and the whole sequence to touching down on the surface took only six-anda-half minutes,” says INSIGHT project manager Tom Hoffman at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, United States. “During that short span of time INSIGHT had to autonomously perform dozens of operations and do them flawlessly – and by all indications that is exactly what our spacecraft did.”
When landing was complete surface operations commenced. There were still boxes to tick, the first of which was deploying the two decagonal solar arrays which will harness the weaker rays of the Sun to power the spacecraft. This was accomplished without a glitch and confirmation was relayed back to Earth via NASA’s Odyssey spacecraft. These events were performed without any scientists’ knowledge as communications between mission control and INSIGHT are delayed by five-and-a-half hours due to the enormous distance.
“Landing was thrilling, but I'm looking forward to the drilling,” says INSIGHT principal investigator Bruce Banerdt of JPL. "When the first images come down our engineering and science teams will hit the ground running beginning to plan where to deploy our science instruments. Within two or three months the arm will deploy the mission's main science instruments, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) and Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instruments.”
As of 6 December 2018 INSIGHT has also successfully deployed its two-metre (six-foot) robotic arm and showed it’s ready for action. The Instrument Deployment Camera located on the elbow of the robotic arm will take many photos of the terrain surrounding the lander and create a full mosaic.
These images will help the mission team in deciding where to place SEIS and HP3. Every task that has been – and will be – undertaken will make or break the mission, and it’s the fine margins that will lead to the most ground-shaking discoveries of Mars and its elusive interior. By probing deeper than any lander before it, the results from this mission will reveal the evolution of the planet and understand why it appears so geologically inactive.
“Within two or three months the arm will deploy the mission's main science instruments”