{"id":13957,"date":"2018-03-02T20:15:56","date_gmt":"2018-03-02T12:15:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/insight-lander-flown-to-california-for-final-launch-preps\/"},"modified":"2018-03-02T20:15:56","modified_gmt":"2018-03-02T12:15:56","slug":"insight-lander-flown-to-california-for-final-launch-preps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/insight-lander-flown-to-california-for-final-launch-preps\/","title":{"rendered":"InSight lander flown to California for final launch preps"},"content":{"rendered":"
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NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft, seen here in its launch configuration shortly after arriving at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, is set for launch May 5. Credit: Lockheed Martin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NASA\u2019s robotic InSight Mars lander arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California this week aboard a U.S. Air Force cargo plane, ready for final testing, fueling and launch aboard an Atlas 5 rocket May 5, two years later the originally planned.<\/p>\n

Carried aboard an Air Force C-17 transport plane, the spacecraft touched down on Vandenberg\u2019s runway Wednesday afternoon after a trip from Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado, near Lockheed Martin\u2019s spacecraft manufacturing facility in Denver.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Air Force C-17 crew from the 21st Airlift Squadron gave us a great ride,\u201d said Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager, from NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. \u201cNext time InSight travels as high and as fast, it will be about 23 seconds into its launch, on the way to Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n

Teams transferred InSight, which took the trip inside an environmentally-controlled container, to an Astrotech clean room on the base, where engineers unpacked the lander from its shipping box Thursday to begin several weeks of checkouts and tests.<\/p>\n

InSight\u2019s launch window May 5 opens at 4:05 a.m. PDT (7:05 a.m. EDT; 1105 GMT) and extends for two hours. The mission has until June 8 to launch and reach Mars for an automated landing Nov. 26.<\/p>\n

The mission will be the first planetary probe to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base.<\/p>\n

The spacecraft was supposed to launch in March 2016, but problems sealing a vacuum enclosure containing one of the lander\u2019s primary instruments, a seismometer, forced officials to postpone the mission. Mars launch opportunities come once every 26 months, when the planets are in the proper positions in the solar system, so the next chance to send InSight to the red planet is in May.<\/p>\n

The seismometer sensors are now healthy, their enclosure sealed, and are ready for launch. The InSight spacecraft itself, along with a German-built heat probe sensor and the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, were all in position at Vandenberg for the March 2016 launch when NASA managers decided in December 2015 to keep the mission on the ground.<\/p>\n

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Crews load the InSight spacecraft into its Air Force C-17 transport plane at Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado, for shipment to California. Credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/Lockheed Martin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Officials flew the InSight spacecraft back to its Lockheed Martin factory after NASA\u2019s decision, and placed the lander in storage until last year, when the redesigned seismometer package arrived from France. Technicians installed the seismometer on the lander, then put the craft through a series of thermal, vacuum and acoustic tests to ensure it will survive the journey to Mars.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe really wrung out everything on the vehicle,\u201d said Scott Daniels, Lockheed Martin\u2019s assembly, test and launch operations manager for InSight. \u201cThis time around, we had all the flight components in, and we got a lot of good performance testing and environmental testing that gives us confidence that we\u2019re ready to launch.\u201d<\/p>\n

InSight is already in its launch configuration, with the lander cocooned inside a heat shield and back shell that will protect it during the cruise to Mars, and then during entry into the Martian atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Once ground crews place InSight on a rotation fixture in the clean room, they will begin testing the spacecraft to ensure it was undamaged during the trip from Colorado to California. Engineers will also upload a final version of InSight\u2019s flight software program into the lander\u2019s computer, Daniels said in an interview.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce we get it checked out, they\u2019ll take the heat shield off of it again, which exposes the bottom of the spacecraft,\u201d said Bruce Banerdt, InSight\u2019s principal investigator at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cThat will allow them to make the final connections that we need to make in order to run all the verification tests on the electronics to make sure everything is fine after shipment, and allow us access to fill the propellant tanks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Workers will load helium pressurant and hydrazine fuel into the spacecraft later this month, then engineers will ready InSight to meet its Atlas 5 booster, a process that includes encapsulating the probe inside the Atlas 5\u2019s nose cone.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe stay in the launch configuration,\u201d Daniels said. \u201cThere\u2019s really a limited number of things that we have access to and also a limited of number of things we\u2019re really going test while we\u2019re there. It\u2019s pretty close to a \u2018ship and shoot\u2019 for a NASA mission.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe integrate with the payload adapter, do the final heat shield installation, close out, do the encapsulation, and drive out to the pad,\u201d Daniels said.<\/p>\n

The Atlas 5 rocket originally assigned to launch InSight, designated AV-062, instead launched with the WorldView 4 Earth-imaging satellite in November 2016. A different Atlas 5 vehicle, numbered AV-078, is currently at Vandenberg, where it could be stacked on the launch mount at Space Launch Complex 3-East as soon as this weekend.<\/p>\n

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File photo of an Atlas 5-401 rocket on Space Launch Complex 3-East at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Credit: United Launch Alliance<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Plans to transfer the Atlas 5\u2019s first stage to the Vandenberg launch pad Friday were thwarted by heavy rainfall at the West Coast launch base.<\/p>\n

Once the first stage is lifted vertical inside the launch pad\u2019s mobile service gantry, ULA\u2019s team will hoist a Centaur upper stage atop the rocket. After a series of rocket tests, InSight will join the Atlas 5 at the launch pad in mid-April.<\/p>\n

InSight will launch on the lightest version of the Atlas 5 family \u2014 known as the \u201c401\u201d configuration \u2014 with no solid rocket boosters and a four-meter (13-foot) diameter payload fairing.<\/p>\n

InSight could launch from Florida or California, but ULA and NASA agreed to launch InSight from Vandenberg to reduce the Atlas 5 team\u2019s workload at Cape Canaveral, where up to a half-dozen flights are planned this year. InSight is the only Atlas 5 mission set for launch from Vandenberg in 2018.<\/p>\n

Lockheed Martin built the InSight lander on the design of the Phoenix probe, which touched down on Mars in 2008. Phoenix launched from Cape Canaveral in 2007 on a smaller Delta 2 rocket, a launcher set for retirement later this year, and InSight\u2019s mass at launch is well below the maximum interplanetary lift capability of even the lightest Atlas 5 configuration.<\/p>\n

That means InSight does not require the extra boost of energy a rocket would obtain from the Earth\u2019s rotation by launching to the east from Cape Canaveral. The Atlas 5 launching InSight will instead head south over the Pacific Ocean from Vandenberg, which is located around 140 miles (225 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

Two CubeSats developed at JPL will accompany InSight on the launch. Once they arrive near Mars, the CubeSats will relay telemetry from InSight back to Earth as the probe descends through the Martian atmosphere.<\/p>\n

But the experimental nano-probes are secondary to InSight\u2019s mission, and the lander\u2019s success will not depend on the CubeSats.<\/p>\n

InSight will touch down at Elysium Planitia, a broad plain just north of the Martian equator, and use a robotic arm to place its seismic enclosure on the Martian surface to listen for quakes. The lander\u2019s heat probe will burrow to a depth of around 16 feet, or 5 meters, to measure the amount of heat escaping the planet\u2019s interior.<\/p>\n

The seismometer instrument will be able to measure ground movements as small as half the radius of a hydrogen atom, NASA said, to sense minor shaking that may originate deep inside Mars. No mission has made a confirmed detection of \u201cmarsquakes\u201d before, but instrumentation left behind by the Apollo astronauts discovered such tremors on the moon.<\/p>\n

Scientists want to know about the structure of Mars\u2019 interior, and they say InSight\u2019s findings will help their understanding of how rocky planets, including Earth, formed in the early solar system.<\/p>\n

NASA officials were uncomfortable launching InSight with a faulty seismometer instrument because the sensor package\u2019s measurements are central to the mission\u2019s overall objectives.<\/p>\n

CNES, the French space agency, is responsible for providing the seismic instrument.<\/p>\n

The InSight mission\u2019s budget from NASA was originally $675 million, but the two-year delay will push the cost above $800 million. Those figures do not include funding from CNES and DLR, the German space agency, for InSight\u2019s two main instruments.<\/p>\n

The cost of the delay was primarily borne by NASA, but CNES was also on the hook for some of the instrument rework, officials said.<\/p>\n

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The InSight lander is pictured inside a clean room at Lockheed Martin\u2019s facility in Denver during solar array deployment testing in January. Credit: Lockheed Martin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In an interview Thursday with Spaceflight Now, Banerdt said U.S. and French engineers jointly redesigned the thermal vacuum enclosure containing the seismic sensors.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe basic structure of it is the same as it was before, but we looked at all the connections, all the welds, everything in the vacuum container that might possibly be a problem, beefed it up, made it more robust in just about every way that we could, and even put some materials on the inside that would absorb gases, mostly for gases that would come off things like adhesives \u2014 outgassing on the inside of the container \u2014 but also would be able to somewhat mitigate a small leak on Mars as well,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The enclosure passed a vacuum leak check last year before the seismometer team shipped the instrument to the United States from France.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe went and tested the living bejesus out of it, in every way that we would,\u201d Banerdt said. \u201cAnd it passed all our tests with flying colors before we even put the seismometers inside one. We had a qualification model that was identical to what we were going to use for flight and tested it to much more extreme conditions than the flight model will ever see, and had absolutely no problems. We all believe that we\u2019ve got a really, really solid vacuum enclosure for the seismometer.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists also used the two-year delay to upgrade the seismic package, and make the instrument more sensitive to quakes on Mars.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe went back and did a little bit of work on the seismometer sensors themselves \u2014 the so-called VBBs, or Very Broadband Sensors \u2014 and beefed them up a little bit and tweaked their performance based on some of the testing that we did for the 2016 launch opportunity,\u201d Banerdt said. \u201cWe were able to just change a few components in the electronics to get about a factor of two-and-a-half better performance out of the seismometers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe really did not want to slip this these two years, but I think we took really good advantage of the opportunity that we had in order to make the whole system more reliable and better performing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NASA\u2019s InSight spacecraft, seen here in its launch configuration shortly after arriving at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, is set for launch May 5. Credit: Lockheed Martin NASA\u2019s robotic InSight Mars lander arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California this week aboard a U.S. Air Force cargo plane, ready for final testing, fueling and […]<\/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":[724,2964,690,1913,1914,242,455,927],"class_list":["post-13957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-atlas-5","tag-av-078","tag-cnes","tag-discovery-program","tag-dlr","tag-france","tag-germany","tag-insight"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13957"}],"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=13957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}