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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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