NASA’s Insight probe landed successfully on Mars on November 26th, 2018, after journeying across space for six and a half months. Its name is yet another horrible mashup of word salad that NASA is famous for, the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.
There were two main instruments the lander was to use for checking out the geology below the surface of the ground, a seismometer and a “mole” th
at was to hammer itself into the ground, measuring temperature and thermal conductivity of the ground as it went. The intent was to drive itself down a full 16 feet to help Mars expedition planners understand what options were available for building underground habitats, among other things.
The seismometer is performing well, and has sent back to Earth the sounds of the Martian winds. But the mole got itself stuck almost immediately.
As reported in SpaceFlightNow,
The InSight lander’s robotic arm deployed German-built Heat and Physical Properties Package — known as HP3 — on the Martian surface in February, the second of two science instruments placed a few feet from the spacecraft since its landing Nov. 26.
HP3’s metallic mole began burrowing into the Martian soil Feb. 28, aiming to reach a depth of up to 16 feet (5 meters) — deeper than any previous Mars lander — with a series of thousands of hammer blows planned in several stages over several weeks.
But within minutes, an obstruction stopped the mole at a depth of roughly 1 foot (30 centimeters), diverting the probe to a tilt of roughly 15 degrees. Another four-hour hammering session March 2 produced no further progress, and mission managers ordered a stop to the digging operation to allow engineers to evaluate the situation.
The mole is design to tilt and slide itself around individual rocks, but apparently they didn’t think about what would happen if it hit a rock before it got all the way out of the support tube. The mole is only 16″ long, but the back end of it is still held vertically in place by the rest of the instrument.
They are debating what to do, but the prevailing opinion is that they can’t get out of this mess. Although it’s understandable that we wouldn’t know what we would encounter under the surface of a given landing zone (that’s part of the point of the mission), I have a couple of questions:
a) there is no provision for relaxing the vertical position of the launching tube — what did they think would happen if they ran into a rock right away?
b) the mole is built to pound itself around round rocks — which are formed only by water flow erosion. Rocks on Mars are quite visibly rectangular shapes where solid material is fractured by seismic action and temperature cycles. Why did we expect round rocks?
Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said March 26 that ground teams are assessing the possibility of moving the surface support structure using the lander’s robotic arm. InSight is a stationary spacecraft, so the options to relocate the HP3 instrument’s surface structure are limited.
“It’s actually designed to be able to go around a rock,” Banerdt said. “If it hits a rock at an angle of 45 degrees or so, it can change its direction and actually go around the rock. So we’re looking at possibly moving the surface structure so that it’s not being constrained at the top.
“We’re not completely giving up yet,” Banerdt said last week during a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science. “It doesn’t look real promising…”
We spend many millions of dollars doing these things. It would not seem too much to ask to pass a design concept around for public comment before committing it to a launch.
The instruments aboard the lander were built by various European agencies. Was this mission mainly just an exercise to exhibit feel-good global togetherness — and spread the wealth around? We could point out that the United States is the only country to successfully land on Mars and perform useful work, despite multiple attempts by the European Space Agency, and the Soviet Union/Russia. Maybe we should keep it that way until some other polity demonstrates that they have the chops to compete on this level.
