{"id":13492,"date":"2018-11-26T01:53:34","date_gmt":"2018-11-25T17:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/mars-lander-on-course-for-monday-touchdown\/"},"modified":"2018-11-26T01:53:34","modified_gmt":"2018-11-25T17:53:34","slug":"mars-lander-on-course-for-monday-touchdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/mars-lander-on-course-for-monday-touchdown\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars lander on course for Monday touchdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION<\/p>\n

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The InSight spacecraft approaches Mars in this artist\u2019s concept. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After a six-month voyage from Earth, NASA\u2019s InSight Mars lander, streaking through space at at some 12,300 mph, will slam into the thin martian atmosphere Monday afternoon to begin a nail-biting six-and-a-half-minute descent to the surface, kicking off a billion-dollar mission to probe the red planet\u2019s hidden interior.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal of InSight is nothing less than to better understand the birth of the Earth, the birth of the planet we live on, and we\u2019re going to do that by going to Mars,\u201d said Principle Investigator Bruce Banerdt.<\/p>\n

On Earth, plate tectonics and the constantly churning mantle have altered the planet\u2019s deep interior, obscuring its history and evolution. But Mars is a smaller planet and much less active than Earth, retaining the \u201cfingerprints\u201d of those earlier processes.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy mapping out these boundaries, these various different sections of the inside of the planet, we can then understand better how the planet formed and how our planet got to be the way it is where we can actually live and play and have a good time. \u2026 So, we\u2019re going to go to Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n

A final correction maneuver was planned Sunday afternoon to slightly tweak InSight\u2019s trajectory and ensure an on-target landing on a broad plain known as Elysium Planitia.<\/p>\n

But as with all Mars landings, InSight\u2019s fully automated descent 90 million miles away will take place far beyond any direct control \u2014 or help \u2014 from engineers on Earth. In fact, it will take radio signals 8.1 minutes to make their way to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where anxious scientists and engineers will be waiting to find out whether the spacecraft made it successfully to the surface.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve done everything we can, we\u2019ve done everything we can think of to make sure we\u2019re going to be successful,\u201d said Tom Hoffman, the InSight project manager. \u201cBut you just never know what\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nestled inside a flying saucer-shaped \u201caeroshell\u201d and protected by a state-of-the-art heat shield, InSight will begin its plunge at around 2:47 p.m. EST Monday, enduring braking forces up to 7.4 times the strength of Earth\u2019s gravity as it rapidly slows down and heats up to around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n

Four minutes later, at an altitude of 7.5 miles and now moving at a still supersonic 928 mph, a 39-foot-wide parachute will unfurl, inflating with a force of 15,000 pounds per square foot to slow the craft to a much more manageable 295 mph or so.<\/p>\n

The no-longer-needed heat shield then will be jettisoned, exposing the bottom of the lander to the environment, and 10 seconds after that, its three landing legs will unfold and lock in place.<\/p>\n

A few seconds later, about one minute before touchdown, InSight\u2019s downward-looking radar will be activated, measuring the spacecraft\u2019s altitude and rate of descent and feeding those data to the lander\u2019s flight computer.<\/p>\n

Finally, less than a mile above the surface and descending at about 134 mph, InSight will be released from the aeroshell and parachute to fall freely on its own.<\/p>\n

One second later, twelve small rocket motors will fire up, each one generating about 68 pounds of thrust as they pulse on and off 10 times per second, first moving the spacecraft to one side to avoid the falling parachute and aeroshell.<\/p>\n

Nulling out its horizontal velocity and slowing to about 5 mph, InSight is expected to touch down on Elysium Planitia around 2:54 p.m., roughly 2 p.m. local time on Mars.<\/p>\n

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Artist\u2019s illustration of the InSight spacecraft on Mars. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fifteen minutes later, after waiting for the dust kicked up by the thrusters to settle back to the ground, InSight\u2019s two circular solar arrays will unfold to begin recharging the spacecraft\u2019s batteries. The arrays would generate about 1,300 watts of power on Earth, but at Mars, with its relatively dusty atmosphere, they\u2019ll manage just 300 to 600 or so.<\/p>\n

The entry, descent and landing sequence was timed to coincide with the passage overhead of NASA\u2019s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is programmed to record UHF telemetry radioed up from Insight during its plunge to the surface. That data will be stored on board the orbiter and relayed back to Earth about three hours after touchdown.<\/p>\n

Realtime data will be beamed back from two experimental spacecraft known as Mars Cube One \u2014 MarCO \u2014 A and B that were launched with InSight back in May. They are the first so-called \u201cCubeSats\u201d to make an interplanetary voyage and they are the primary way flight controllers will be able to follow InSight\u2019s descent.<\/p>\n

Unlike the much more sophisticated Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the MarCO spacecraft, which cost about $18.5 million to build, feature radio gear that can take in UHF signals from InSight and immediately relay them back to Earth at X-band frequencies.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it works, the two MarCO spacecraft will relay the data for InSight entry, descent and landing almost as it\u2019s happening, which will be very cool for both the MarCO team and the InSight team to figure out what\u2019s going on with the lander as soon as possible,\u201d said  Anne Marinan, a manager of the Mars Cube One project at JPL.<\/p>\n

Regardless, InSight \u2014 the convoluted acronym stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport \u2014 will send a computer-generated \u201ctone\u201d directly back to Earth seven minutes after touchdown to indicate its general health.<\/p>\n

But detailed telemetry will not arrive until the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter relays its stored data three hours after touchdown. Confirmation the solar arrays deployed normally will be relayed back by NASA\u2019s Mars Odyssey orbiter about five-and-a-half hours after landing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am completely excited and completely nervous all at the same time, because everything that we\u2019ve done to date makes us feel comfortable that we\u2019re going to land on Mars,\u201d Hoffman said. \u201cBut everything has to go perfectly. Mars could always throw us a curve ball.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if it works, InSight will pay off with the first detailed look at the interior of Mars, providing long-sought answers to questions about how planets were assembled when the solar system coalesced from a cloud of debris 4.5 billion years ago.<\/p>\n

InSight is equipped with two primary instruments: the Seismic Experiment Interior Structure \u2014 SEIS \u2014 seismometer, provided by the French space agency, CNES, and the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe \u2014 HP3 \u2014 provided by the German Aerospace Agency, DLR. The two instruments cost the European space agencies about $180 million.<\/p>\n

To work properly, both instruments must be lowered to Mars\u2019 surface with a robot arm and both require a relatively flat, rock-free area near the base of the lander. The Elysium Planitia landing site was chosen because it provides just that.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs landing engineers, we really like this landing site,\u201d said Rob Grover, manager of InSight\u2019s entry, descent and landing on Elysium Planitia. \u201cIt\u2019s flat, it doesn\u2019t have many rocks, it\u2019s a very safe place to land.\u201d<\/p>\n

Engineers will use cameras on the lander to precisely examine the area around the spacecraft to make sure the instruments are placed in the best possible location.<\/p>\n

But it won\u2019t be quick.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of a laid back, slow-motion mission compared to a lot of things that we\u2019ve done before,\u201d Banerdt said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to take us probably two or three months, at least, to get our instruments down. We have to do a survey of the area in front of our spacecraft, make sure we don\u2019t put the instruments down on a rock or in a hole or something like that.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then we\u2019re very, very very careful about how we put the instruments down. \u2026 So it\u2019s going to take us probably a month or two to get the seismometer down and another month or so to get the heat flow probe down and penetrating down into the surface. We\u2019re probably looking at early next spring when we\u2019re really going to start bringing back that kind of science from Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n

The seismometer is capable of detecting movements smaller than the width of a hydrogen atom, to record the faint vibrations of remote marsquakes, meteor strikes and even the slight tidal tugs caused by the passage of Mars\u2019 two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, to map out the planet\u2019s inner structure.<\/p>\n

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Diagram of the InSight spacecraft. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The self-hammering temperature probe will pound its way to a depth of up to 15 feet to measure temperature changes and, by extrapolation, determine how much heat is flowing out of the core deep below.<\/p>\n

In a third investigation, precise analysis of radio signals from the lander as Mars rotates will enable scientists to determine the exact orientation of its polar axis as it slowly wobbles, or precesses, due to the core \u201csloshing around\u201d in the deep interior. From those data, they hope to determine the core\u2019s size, density and composition.<\/p>\n

The goal is to help scientists understand how the solar system\u2019s terrestrial planets \u2014 Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars \u2014 formed and how they evolved into the very different worlds we see today.<\/p>\n

\u201cVenus is hot enough to melt lead,\u201d Banerdt told reporters last week. \u201cMercury has a sun-baked surface. Mars is pretty cold today, but Earth is a nice place to take a vacation. We\u2019d really like to know why one planet goes one way and another planet goes another way. Those answers are in the details of the structure that\u2019s formed very early in the planet\u2019s history.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Earth, that structure has been \u201csort of scrambled up, both by plate tectonics and by mantle convection,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so, the evidence of the very earliest processes has been wiped away.\u201d<\/p>\n

But on Mars, a planet half the size of Earth where plate tectonics and a churning mantle are not at work, evidence of the planet\u2019s early history is still preserved in the deep interior.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese processes that do this all happen in the first few tens of millions of years,\u201d Banerdt said. \u201cWe\u2019d like to be able to understand what happened, and the clues to that are in the structure of the planet that gets set up in these early years.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION The InSight spacecraft approaches Mars in this artist\u2019s concept. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech After a six-month voyage from Earth, NASA\u2019s InSight Mars lander, streaking through space at at some 12,300 mph, will slam into the thin martian atmosphere Monday afternoon to begin a nail-biting six-and-a-half-minute descent to the surface, kicking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[690,1913,1914,242,455,927,1183,472],"class_list":["post-13492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-cnes","tag-discovery-program","tag-dlr","tag-france","tag-germany","tag-insight","tag-jet-propulsion-laboratory","tag-lockheed-martin"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13492"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}