Another successful landing on Mars. NASA is on a roll!
PASADENA, Calif. — Mars just welcomed a new robotic resident.
NASA's InSight lander touched down safely on the Martian surface today (Nov. 26), pulling off the first successful Red Planet landing since the Curiosity rover's arrival in August 2012 — on the seventh anniversary of Curiosity's launch, no less.
Signals confirming InSight's touchdown came down to Earth at 2:53 p.m. EST (1953 GMT), eliciting whoops of joy and relief from mission team members and NASA officials here at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the InSight mission. A few minutes later, the team received confirmation from the lander that it's functioning after the landing.
On pins and needles. The Lander needs to open it's solar panels or it will die a fast death. Hopefully they will get confirmation soon...
Being a "lander" it won't go on any scenic tours and it landed in a flat featureless plain. So from a visual stand point this won't be a very exciting mission to watch. But the science mission is extremely important and hopefully all works as planned.
This is great. I didn't realize until just a few days ago that the lander will be drilling five meters down! I've read that potential for life (i.e. microbial) on Mars increases significantly after about two meters, due to the radiation shielding the ground provides.
And I'll be looking forward to the seismology detection snapshots of what lies beneath. In particular, it will be larger asteroidal impacts on the side of Mars opposite to the Insight lander's location that should presumably illuminate the core more prominently, so they can see if any evidence highlights intense fracturing and fissuring caused by the monumental impacts that could possibly have created the prominent volcanic cones we've come to know so well. The Hellas impact site was truly massive and I believe it might have cracked Mars from one end to the other, causing an initially molten core to propagate all the way to the surface, giving birth to the Tarsis volcanoes and Olympus Mons. That would be a WOW moment.
The precise triangular arrangements of that system of volcanoes is unholy in the very precisely triangular placement of the cones. It's like the impact which produced them was so incredibly hard, the shock waves propagated were very, very sharply defined. Like, how did something so naturally occurring create a surface feature that is more like an equilateral triangle with a cone situated at each of the points? This is very important because you don't expect to see such large scale features accumulating like that.
We knew they were going to land on a vast flat featureless plain with at best small rocks. But look at that rock in the center of the imagine. Looks pretty big! Imagine if the lander by chance landed on that? Probably would've tipped over or landed on it's side. Imagine blindly landing on another planet and hoping by chance it doesn't land on a rock? Because that's pretty much what they had to do.
@ Grecchus- Agreed and can't wait for the science to come in.
Sol, the lander being on the equator, it appears to have its 'ear' against the surface so as to allow it to see the magma channels and all the 'pipework' from the shield volcanoes in profile. If any seismic returns can pick them out, it just might be possible to see how deep they go. Unfortunately, it might be some time before any such results can be relayed to the public. That has got to be the most important experiment of the lot.
Amazing photo of the landing site. The heat shield crashed at the rim of a large crater. Imagine if the lander ended up there? On the rim, maybe toppling over on landing?! The lander itself touched down within 400 yards of two large craters. Whats the chance it "found" a flat safe patch on ground to settle on?
The Face On Mars is a good representation of disinformation receiving widespread coverage from the time back when it prevailed.
What is interesting and unexpected is that in an ever deeper information age as exits now, instead of useful propagation of news and information what we find is the exact opposite.
for first quote.
For second quote.
