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Probe From NASA's InSight Lander Burrows Into the Soil of Mars (space.com)
"The 'mole' aboard NASA's InSight Mars lander has encountered stiff resistance on its first subsurface sojourn beneath the surface of the Red Planet," reports Space.com:
In a major mission milestone, InSight's Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument burrowed underground for the first time on Feb. 28. After 400 hammer blows over the course of four hours, the instrument apparently got between 7 inches and 19.7 inches (18 to 50 centimeters) beneath the red dirt -- but obstacles slowed its progress, mission team members said...
The $850 million InSight lander -- whose name is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- touched down on Nov. 26. The spacecraft aims to map the Red Planet's interior in unprecedented detail. It will do this primarily by characterizing "marsquakes" and other vibrations with a suite of supersensitive seismometers, which was built by a consortium led by the French space agency CNES; and measuring subsurface heat flow with HP3, which DLR provided.
"I'm digging Mars!" announced NASA's official Twitter feed for the InSight robotic lander, adding "My self-hammering mole has started burrowing in, and my team is poring over the data..."
The $850 million InSight lander -- whose name is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- touched down on Nov. 26. The spacecraft aims to map the Red Planet's interior in unprecedented detail. It will do this primarily by characterizing "marsquakes" and other vibrations with a suite of supersensitive seismometers, which was built by a consortium led by the French space agency CNES; and measuring subsurface heat flow with HP3, which DLR provided.
"I'm digging Mars!" announced NASA's official Twitter feed for the InSight robotic lander, adding "My self-hammering mole has started burrowing in, and my team is poring over the data..."
I guess we can rule out the possibility that sandworms really exist.
by the time humans actually get to mars, it will all be smashed into rubble by probes such as this.
motive=results.. cease fire stand down,, there's mothers & children in every town the worlds around..
As the gerbil burrows into the soiled walks of APK's rectum, it suffocates and dies.
A great adventure is waiting for you ahead
Hurry onward Lemmiwinks or you will soon be dead
The journey before you may be long and filled with woahs
But you must escape the gay man's ass or your tale can't be told
Lemmiwinks (x4)
Musk? We need the Thunderbirds! They have a way better Mole. Jokes aside, weight is worse than a swearword in space travel. The hammer is probably as light as possible, or weighted with local rocks, because otherwise it would not have reached the red planet at all. So yeah, you need more blows with a light hammer.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
It should be easy to dig on Mars.
Who said that? A lot of the planet has exposed bedrock just like earth that is impossible to "dig" through.
Also, this is just a lander with a small impact drill. It wouldn't take much more than a good sized rock to slow it down or stop it. You can see such rocks laying around on the ground near the lander.
Better known as 318230.
It depends. Martians are kind of like lemmings so they will probably destroy the probe trying to get control of it and then mope about what could have been
Space nutter reporting for duty. The point of sending machines like this is to characterize the Martian environment so that by the time humans arrive there will be as few surprises as possible. How hard is the soil? How easy is it to get at ice? Is the soil radioactive (which would be at the same time bad news and good news)? Is the soil differentiated into layers near the surface?
The more of these questions our robots can answer now, the better our design of habitats will be.
Why do SLIMY CHAIMIES like 110010001000 always get caught being LYING SCUM they are https://hardware.slashdot.org/... ?
... remember LIFE: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5442430/
Best visual image from a Mars lander ever!
It should be easy to dig on Mars.
Who said that? A lot of the planet has exposed bedrock just like earth that is impossible to "dig" through.
Also, this is just a lander with a small impact drill. It wouldn't take much more than a good sized rock to slow it down or stop it. You can see such rocks laying around on the ground near the lander.
Which is why people would be useful on the surface. They can look for more opportune ways to break through the surface, and even wield tools that no little rover can.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Which is why people would be useful on the surface. They can look for more opportune ways to break through the surface, and even wield tools that no little rover can.
If you can send people, you can also send a massively bigger rover with heavy tools.
"I'm digging Mars." God, I hate it when NASA and other science organizations anthropomorphize everything. It is very unscientific and can give less educated people (most of them voters) the wrong idea about how nature really works. As in, "the virus mutated in order to spread more easily". (I can't find the exact quote now, but you know what I mean.)
So I guess the Insight lander has a personality and a whole PR team to relay its hopes and feelings to its fans and the interested public. If I ask, maybe it will send me an autographed picture. I wonder if Insight writes in block letters or cursive.
Which is why people would be useful on the surface. They can look for more opportune ways to break through the surface, and even wield tools that no little rover can.
If you can send people, you can also send a massively bigger rover with heavy tools.
But people will still be more efficient at picking the correct place to drill, and not having a delay waiting for responses from base.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
People on the surface wouldn't wield tools with their hands to break through the surface anyway. And landing people (and all they need to survive and to return) means so much more mass that you could just as well deliver a massive automated drilling rig with no people needed.
The only reason to land people is if you want to land people. And wanting to do this is a fully justified reason to do it. There's no need to find hilarious excuses to do so.
Dude, the Nazis all got killed in the 1940s. Didn't you get the memo?
Wait, why is this needed? You guys assured me that colonizing Mars is not only possible, but within the reach of current technology. How would you know that unless you already did all the necessary research?
That sounds like a problem. How are we going to get all that construction equipment to Mars? Is there a rental place nearby?
How would you deliver a massive automated drilling rig? Is there an automated drilling rig on Earth that requires no people and no maintenance? If not, why not?
Good thing you clarified that. Otherwise we might have thought it was the other kind of subsurface sojourn - the one that happens twenty feet up in the air.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Because on Earth using people as universal bio-robots is much cheaper. What is so hard to understand about that?
Back in the Apollo days each man hour on the Moon did cost about $1B. If crews for drilling rigs on Earth would cost that much per man hour, there would be only automated drilling rigs. What do you think?
But people will still be more efficient at picking the correct place to drill, and not having a delay waiting for responses from base.
I don't believe people are more efficient if you include all the time and effort to transport them to Mars and back, and keeping them alive during their stay.
The InSight rover is less than 1000 pounds, costs less than $1 billion, and construction started in 2014. Let's compare that to a realistic human mission.
Which is why people would be useful on the surface. They can look for more opportune ways to break through the surface, and even wield tools that no little rover can.
If you can send people, you can also send a massively bigger rover with heavy tools.
But people will still be more efficient at picking the correct place to drill, and not having a delay waiting for responses from base.
You have a funny definition of efficiency. It’s not like people can just step off the space bus with dousing rods and jackhammer sling over their shoulder like this is Martian Minecraft. It would still be cheaper to dynamite the surface, bag up some rocks, transport them back to earth, then getting a habitat on Mars. For the price of a manned habitat you could send many many more robots.
Back in the Apollo days each man hour on the Moon did cost about $1B.
Sheesh, that's almost as much as Bezo's girlfriend cost him.
an abandoned martian hyperloop.
then where is the profit to be made?
what do you think?
How would you deliver a massive automated drilling rig? Is there an automated drilling rig on Earth that requires no people and no maintenance? If not, why not?
If we're going to hand wave away the difficulties sending a bunch of scientists and equipment on a one way trip to Mars, then we can also AT LEAST look away from the problems with plunking an automated drilling platform on that rock.
of written-off John Carter DVDs.
How efficient do you think people would be when the temperature is -100 F? Because that's summer on Mars.
"between 18 to 50 centimeters"
Wow, those depth sensors must have cost a fortune.
The point of sending machines like this is to characterize the Martian environment so that by the time humans arrive
Reporter is interviewing an elderly farmer:
Q: Why do you keep plow horses?
A: I need to grow a crop of oats every year.
Q: And why do you need to raise a crop of oats every year?
A:To feed the plow horses
How efficient do you think people would be when the temperature is -100 F? Because that's summer on Mars.
Actually, summer daytime temperatures on Mars get into the double-digit numbers C in the mid latitudes. (That's "above 50 F" for you Farenheiters).
Nights get pretty cold, though.
https://www.space.com/16907-what-is-the-temperature-of-mars.html
The InSight rover is less than 1000 pounds....
Lander. It doesn't rove.
Sheesh! Less than two feet in four hours. I told you they should have sent Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
That's what they WANT us to believe. The truth is that they are on the other side of the moon riding dinosaurs. Didn't you watch the documentary?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Trenching has been done with Viking and Phoenix. (And wheel-trenching with the MER rovers) It's interesting, but doesn't get you very deep below surface.
And no, I doubt you can move a one-ton lander by reaching out and pulling on dirt. The best you might do, if you have a really strong arm, and can grab onto the surface very very strongly, would be to tip it over.
They spend all of their PR efforts on rank bullshit such as answering dopey student questions from space, tweeting space probes and celebrating diversity while completely neglecting substantive science.
NASA is the agency of: L@@k we have big rockets and space drills!!!1!!!!
Simple, ant grunt could tell you that:
Proper
Planning
Prevents
Piss
Poor
Performance
Here on Earth, companies spend years planning for new endeavors. have you ever heard of a mine being started without drilling test holes or sounding out the layers of strata beneath them?
More similar to Mars, do you think that the organizations that send people to study Antarctica just drop them off on the runway and say, "We've done this before, no planning needed, just dig a hole and lay in it, we'll be back for you later"?
People chose the place this lander is drilling. They took over a month to do so.
Mars soil is full of rocks, gee, who would've guessed? What if it hits a rock too big to move? That gizmo may not be strong enough to break through or get around.
Then again, that's what exploration is all about: you don't know what's down there until you actually go. Failure is knowledge.
Table-ized A.I.
Exploration has never been about efficiency. At the governmental & bureaucratic level we've become so risk-adverse that we seem to be simply running in place. If we'd taken the same risk aversion to atmospheric flight, we'd still be waiting for our first cross-atlantic attempt. Sure, I could find a drone to fly up that mountain - why should I risk life & limb by going myself? Americans once threw everything they owned into wagons to go West, never knowing if they'd survive the enormous risk. We limit our risk these days to virtual, synthetic risk. According to wiki and other sources, we're spending over $2 billion per mission to Mars. That's a lot of money to drill 9-20 inches. Give me a jack hammer, give me a pick axe. My father expected us to have a base on the moon long ago. It's now a big deal to simply get something to the lunar surface. Why is that?
Why on earth, erm, why on mars woould the soil be radioactive?
The atmosphere on Mars is almost a vacuum, so the temperature is almost irrelevant to space-suited astronauts.
um, i hope you are joking
without a magnetosphere like the earth has
mars is exposed directly to solar radiation and the cosmic background
Is there a reason NASA chose to use hammer blows to dig down rather than a drill or borer? Did it have to do with the amount of energy required to drill compared to hammering?
It would seem a long, slow drilling process would be more beneficial to making a hole than continually pounding into the ground.
Why would you want to transport the people back though?
When your teleporter pad finally proves itself—less than one melted person per thousand—visit us again, and we'll talk.
That's very expensive for four days total work on the ground when you decide not to send an air plant because that would weight many thousands of pounds.
Why don't you go check? I'm sure musk wouldn't mind if you borrowed his Tesla for a few orbits. Remember though; its hard to check your blind spot in those space helmets, so you better not wear it.
Lots of effort just to get a few inches in during that time of the month. Seriously, wait about a week, or try a little foreplay.
The InSight rover is less than 1000 pounds, costs less than $1 billion, and construction started in 2014. Let's compare that to a realistic human mission.
A realistic human mission will take about $200 Billion and 30 years for four people to have four months of boots on Mars. That equates to about 200 robot mission to Mars and if the past mars missions, those will get at least a year of service each. We'll assume that's over the same 30 years. This equates to 1.33 man years of research on Mars* versus 200 robot years. Sort of boils down to "Are humans 150 times more efficient than robots at the tasks needed on Mars?" Perhaps on Earth, but there is a lot of time taken up in moving on Mars, dealing with airlocks, and being just as careful as the robots would be. We would probalby have to take a look at the moon missions to see how well those astronauts preformed their tasks to get an idea. We could look at how well previous Mars probes did theirs. Then you could compare and try and get an estimate of which would result in more actual data and the quality of that data.
*Sure, they could leave some equipment on Mars to, but it would be a very small bit of their payload and people will be sleeping at least a third of the time they're on Mars. We'll just call it a wash.