NASA was able to quickly confirm the landing thanks to a flawless performance by two tiny satellites that accompanied the lander. These CubeSats caught and relayed InSight’s signal to Earth, along with a bonus: a first picture of the terrain where the lander will place its two instruments.
If all goes as hoped, NASA will catch word of a safe landing thanks to two briefcase-size spacecraft that launched with InSight, together called Mars Cube One (MarCO). These first-ever interplanetary CubeSats sport experimental antennas that will relay InSight’s signal to Earth some 10 to 20 seconds after landing. A small fuel leak on one of the CubeSats has forced its engineers to creatively compensate, angling the spacecraft so the leak pushes in the desired trajectory, says Joel Krajewski, MarCO’s project manager at JPL. “The current trajectory is completely good.”
The MarCo satellites could also relay InSight’s first picture of its landing site. The image, which could come several hours after landing, relayed by an orbiter passing overhead, will be fuzzy—the lander’s two cameras will still have dust caps on. But it should be enough to give JPL’s scientists a good look at their landing site. “Hopefully it’ll be flat and boring,” says Tom Hoffman, the mission’s project manager at JPL.
If MarCO doesn’t do the job, NASA should still hear a “beep” directly from InSight by 12:01 p.m. Yet one of the most critical phases of the landing won’t occur until 16 minutes after touchdown, when the dust kicked up by its landing has settled and Insight unfurls its two solar panels. A status report on the panels won’t arrive until some 5 hours after landing. “Frankly, I will be a little bit nervous until I have the solar panels out,” Hoffman says. “After that, we should be in good shape.”
NASA scientists chose InSight’s landing zone, the vast and dull Elysium Planitia, because they’re interested in Mars’s interior, not its surface. Rocks on the surface could complicate placing the lander’s two primary instruments—a sensitive seismometer and a heat probe—directly on the surface with a robotic arm. It will take several months for the InSight team to choose where to place them. The process mirrors selecting a landing site, and both endeavors have been led by the same JPL scientist, Matthew Golombek. “It’s pretty simple,” he says. “We don’t want a rock underneath. We don’t want a slope that’s too steep. We don’t want underdense material for it to sink into.”
Once mission managers are ready, InSight’s robotic arm will pluck the volleyball-size seismometer from the lander’s deck and place it on the ground, with its power provided by a tether. The arm will then place a wind and heat shield on top of it like a bell jar. The station, developed by French partners, will catch rumbles of marsquakes, important for interpreting the planet’s interior. To avoid the wind vibrations that could trip up its measurements, it will be placed as far away from the lander as possible, up to the arm’s limit of some 1.5 meters away.
The heat probe, developed by German partners, will be deployed soon after. Over the course of a few weeks, it will drive a rod 5 meters into the surface with thousands of strokes of a tungsten hammer, slipping around small rocks—and hopefully not hitting large ones. The heat probe will measure how much heat is escaping from the planet, and how quickly—a clue to when it was most volcanically active. But if there’s only one ideal instrument site, the seismometer takes priority, Golombek says, as it is InSight’s primary scientific payload.
Once all this work is complete, InSight can finally get down to business, using the 50 to 100 marsquakes it might see over its 2-year primary mission to reveal the dimensions and composition of the martian interior—and, in turn, the story of its creation.
NASA’s latest Mars lander, InSight, successfully touched down on the surface of the Red Planet this afternoon, surviving an intense plunge through the Martian atmosphere. It marks the eighth picture-perfect landing on Mars for NASA, adding to the space agency’s impressive track record of putting spacecraft on the planet. And now, InSight’s two-year mission has begun, one that entails listening for Marsquakes to learn about the world’s interior.
IT MARKS THE EIGHTH PICTURE-PERFECT LANDING ON MARS FOR NASA
After six and a half months of traveling through space, InSight hit the top of Mars’ atmosphere a little before 3PM ET. It then made a daring descent to the surface, performing a complex multistep routine that slowed the lander from more than 12,000 miles per hour to just 5 miles per hour before it hit the ground. To get to the surface safely, InSight had to autonomously deploy a supersonic parachute, gather radar measurements, and ignite its thrusters all at the right time. Altogether, the landing took just under seven minutes to complete, prompting the nickname “seven minutes of terror.”
During the plunge, two tiny spacecraft above Mars gathered data of the entire event. The pair of probes are known as the MarCO satellites, and they actually launched in May with InSight from California. The two satellites are modified CubeSats, a type of standardized spacecraft made out of 10-centimeter cubes. They’ve been traveling to Mars on their own ever since launch, making them the first CubeSats to ever go into deep space.
If all goes as hoped, NASA will catch word of a safe landing thanks to two briefcase-size spacecraft that launched with InSight, together called Mars Cube One (MarCO). These first-ever interplanetary CubeSats sport experimental antennas that will relay InSight’s signal to Earth some 10 to 20 seconds after landing. A small fuel leak on one of the CubeSats has forced its engineers to creatively compensate, angling the spacecraft so the leak pushes in the desired trajectory, says Joel Krajewski, MarCO’s project manager at JPL. “The current trajectory is completely good.”
The MarCo satellites could also relay InSight’s first picture of its landing site. The image, which could come several hours after landing, relayed by an orbiter passing overhead, will be fuzzy—the lander’s two cameras will still have dust caps on. But it should be enough to give JPL’s scientists a good look at their landing site. “Hopefully it’ll be flat and boring,” says Tom Hoffman, the mission’s project manager at JPL.
If MarCO doesn’t do the job, NASA should still hear a “beep” directly from InSight by 12:01 p.m. Yet one of the most critical phases of the landing won’t occur until 16 minutes after touchdown, when the dust kicked up by its landing has settled and Insight unfurls its two solar panels. A status report on the panels won’t arrive until some 5 hours after landing. “Frankly, I will be a little bit nervous until I have the solar panels out,” Hoffman says. “After that, we should be in good shape.”
NASA scientists chose InSight’s landing zone, the vast and dull Elysium Planitia, because they’re interested in Mars’s interior, not its surface. Rocks on the surface could complicate placing the lander’s two primary instruments—a sensitive seismometer and a heat probe—directly on the surface with a robotic arm. It will take several months for the InSight team to choose where to place them. The process mirrors selecting a landing site, and both endeavors have been led by the same JPL scientist, Matthew Golombek. “It’s pretty simple,” he says. “We don’t want a rock underneath. We don’t want a slope that’s too steep. We don’t want underdense material for it to sink into.”
Once mission managers are ready, InSight’s robotic arm will pluck the volleyball-size seismometer from the lander’s deck and place it on the ground, with its power provided by a tether. The arm will then place a wind and heat shield on top of it like a bell jar. The station, developed by French partners, will catch rumbles of marsquakes, important for interpreting the planet’s interior. To avoid the wind vibrations that could trip up its measurements, it will be placed as far away from the lander as possible, up to the arm’s limit of some 1.5 meters away.
The heat probe, developed by German partners, will be deployed soon after. Over the course of a few weeks, it will drive a rod 5 meters into the surface with thousands of strokes of a tungsten hammer, slipping around small rocks—and hopefully not hitting large ones. The heat probe will measure how much heat is escaping from the planet, and how quickly—a clue to when it was most volcanically active. But if there’s only one ideal instrument site, the seismometer takes priority, Golombek says, as it is InSight’s primary scientific payload.
Once all this work is complete, InSight can finally get down to business, using the 50 to 100 marsquakes it might see over its 2-year primary mission to reveal the dimensions and composition of the martian interior—and, in turn, the story of its creation.
NASA’s latest Mars lander, InSight, successfully touched down on the surface of the Red Planet this afternoon, surviving an intense plunge through the Martian atmosphere. It marks the eighth picture-perfect landing on Mars for NASA, adding to the space agency’s impressive track record of putting spacecraft on the planet. And now, InSight’s two-year mission has begun, one that entails listening for Marsquakes to learn about the world’s interior.
IT MARKS THE EIGHTH PICTURE-PERFECT LANDING ON MARS FOR NASA
After six and a half months of traveling through space, InSight hit the top of Mars’ atmosphere a little before 3PM ET. It then made a daring descent to the surface, performing a complex multistep routine that slowed the lander from more than 12,000 miles per hour to just 5 miles per hour before it hit the ground. To get to the surface safely, InSight had to autonomously deploy a supersonic parachute, gather radar measurements, and ignite its thrusters all at the right time. Altogether, the landing took just under seven minutes to complete, prompting the nickname “seven minutes of terror.”
During the plunge, two tiny spacecraft above Mars gathered data of the entire event. The pair of probes are known as the MarCO satellites, and they actually launched in May with InSight from California. The two satellites are modified CubeSats, a type of standardized spacecraft made out of 10-centimeter cubes. They’ve been traveling to Mars on their own ever since launch, making them the first CubeSats to ever go into deep space.
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