InSight launching in 2018

[Green Baron]

A fluffy asteroid comet or the icy shell of a moon is something totally different.

Edited November 27, 2018 by Green Baron

[Listy]

They are not specifically meant to be impactors, but a pair of 75kg tungsten blocks (cruise stage mass balances) were detached from the cruise stage & impacted on the surface during EDL. Similar tungsten blocks were released when Curiosity landed & the impact site later was imaged by HiRise, allowing for some science to be done (mainly impact size/morphology related), so I expect the same will be done with the InSight debris field.

[Green Baron]

But these were not meant for surface analyses or to mark a landing zone. It is just debris from the cruise stages and the blocks are balance/stabilization masses. The stuff must go somewhere, it is an inevitable evil, so to say. The proposal here was to create a crater for analysis and to mark a landing zone which would not work. But a landing zone can have several 10s of kilometers in which the touch down/impact will take place and analyses of ejecta from a few meters deep/wide crater is questionable.

Edited November 28, 2018 by Green Baron

[cubinator]

So what happened to InSight's parachute? It's presumably just sitting on the surface in a big pile somewhere nearby? I guess it will make a nice museum artifact in 300 years.

[Green Baron]

I would think so. If i am not mistaken insight cut off the chute when it still had horizontal speed. In this case the cloth would have dropped "earlier" on the trajectory.

There are several chutes on Mars now. Enough for a special theme exhibition by then ;-)

[Adstri]

I'm really glad that the landing went as smoothly as it did.

[RizzoTheRat]

10 hours ago, Green Baron said:

I would think so. If i am not mistaken insight cut off the chute when it still had horizontal speed. In this case the cloth would have dropped "earlier" on the trajectory.

The animation certainly looked like it, but they also mentioned something about the lander flying away from the shell/chute once it lit its engines, so I'd guess they head off a bit to the side to make sure there's plenty of clearance.

[GearsNSuch]

23 minutes ago, RizzoTheRat said:

The animation certainly looked like it, but they also mentioned something about the lander flying away from the shell/chute once it lit its engines, so I'd guess they head off a bit to the side to make sure there's plenty of clearance.

That would be a rather ironic failure...

"InSight has run out of power because the parachute draped itself over the solar panels. Sorry. At least we used the same units this time."

I am somewhat disappointed nothing went wrong, but hey! Successful missions are always great.

[Green Baron]

I am extremely happy it went well, especially after the Skipa ... Spira ... Pirelli impact, i think everyone was a little tense. Looking forward to collecting the science points over the next two years or so :-)

[tater]

 

[DDE]

Dear amateur areologists, what’s your take on the kimetic penetrator-style light landers of the variety attempted with Deep Space 2?

Also, let us hold a minute of silence for the original Smash For Science, Venera-7 and its detection of a volcanic tuff surface via lithobtaking.

[Green Baron]

I first thought it is a messed up seismogram.

What do we see here ? White marks on black background ?

"kemetic" ... ... reminds me of a bronze age discussion we had in here :-)

Edited November 29, 2018 by Green Baron

[DDE]

On 11/28/2018 at 2:46 AM, cubinator said:

So what happened to InSight's parachute? It's presumably just sitting on the surface in a big pile somewhere nearby? I guess it will make a nice museum artifact in 300 years.

12 hours ago, Green Baron said:

I first thought it is a messed up seismogram.

What do we see here ? White marks on black background ?

"kemetic" ... ... reminds me of a bronze age discussion we had in here :-)

After the earlier landers imploded, Babakin had the thing overengineered for 150 atm and stripped off of anything but the thermometer; they used Doppler shift of the comm signal to measure the velocity of lander remotely.

Later landers has their own impact accelerometer and an antenna dish that worked primarily as an aerobrake in lieu of parachutes - in this case the parachutes appear to have melted, plus the descent through the souposphere was dreadfully long.

[FleshJeb]

Whoever runs InSight's Twitter account has a PhD in double-entendres.

[SuperFastJellyfish]

InSight mission team are streaming live(edit: It appears this is just a rerunning of the post EDL press conference.) on NASA TV:

 

Edited December 2, 2018 by SuperFastJellyfish

[tater]

 

[cubinator]

On 12/7/2018 at 1:04 PM, tater said:

 

Wow. Today is the first day humans listen to the sound of alien wind.

It's very eerie to think about the plains there, wind blowing over dust and rocks for millions of years without interruption. Now there are a few strange devices interrupting the monotony at a snail's pace, harbingers of what may become a drastic, abrupt change for the planet.

Edited December 9, 2018 by cubinator

[cubinator]

I found the raw audio (15 minutes of really low wind noises) here: https://www.nasa.gov/connect/sounds/index.html

Raw data from the seismometer (picking up vibrations of the solar panels):

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/InSight-Sounds/06-MASTERRESAMPLED-48Kraw_velocity_0.6_normalisedx1.wav

Data from the air pressure sensor, sped up by a factor of 100:

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/InSight-Sounds/09-APSS-Mars_sound1a_2m_x100.wav

[FleshJeb]

17 minutes ago, cubinator said:

Wow. Today is the first day humans listen to the sound of alien wind.

The Phoenix lander on Mars in 2008 and the Huygens mission to Titan in 2005 both captured descent sounds.

[cubinator]

Is it just me, or is that a moon in the bottom right? It's in four pictures... (the camera was pointed to the sky, this was taken on Sol 4. https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/multimedia/raw-images/?order=sol+desc%2Cdate_taken+desc&per_page=50&page=0&mission=insight)

[ThatGuyWithALongUsername]

Just now, cubinator said:

Is it just me, or is that a moon in the bottom right? It's in four pictures... (the camera was pointed to the sky, this was taken on Sol 4. https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/multimedia/raw-images/?order=sol+desc%2Cdate_taken+desc&per_page=50&page=0&mission=insight)

Nah, it seems inside the atmosphere and not lit by the sun properly. It's probably just dust.

[cubinator]

2 minutes ago, ThatGuyWithALongUsername said:

Nah, it seems inside the atmosphere and not lit by the sun properly. It's probably just dust.

Yeah probably. I see more of them all over the place. I'll be very curious when I go there to find out whether I really can see some stars and planets in daylight as I suspect...

[ThatGuyWithALongUsername]

Just now, cubinator said:

Yeah probably. I see more of them all over the place. I'll be very curious when I go there to find out whether I really can see some stars and planets in daylight as I suspect...

 Haha, yeah, the view from the surface would be stunning. Really the whole journey would be, too.  And the surface itself- Valles Marineris would be an epic tourist destination.

I also note the optimistic "when" instead of "if." I hope so, too.

[DDE]

On 12/8/2018 at 12:05 AM, cubinator said:

Wow. Today is the first day humans listen to the sound of alien wind.

It's very eerie to think about the plains there, wind blowing over dust and rocks for millions of years without interruption. Now there are a few strange devices interrupting the monotony at a snail's pace, harbingers of what may become a drastic, abrupt change for the planet.

Whoa whoa whoa, besides Hyugens, the GROZA microphones on Venera 13 and 14 technically recorded... something.

Attempted reconstruction:

 

[cypher_00]

Insight has taken a selfie:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7302