Hello Space Fans and welcome to another edition of Space Fan News.
In this episode NASA successfully puts another lander on the Red Planet.
Earlier this week, the Mars InSight Lander made it to the Martian surface intact with
some help from little MarCOs: dedicated CubeSats that monitored the lander and relayed telemetry
on the descent.
Well folks NASA has done it again.
Earlier this week, on November 26 2018 at 19:52 Universal Time after travelling for
728 days, the InSight Mars lander touched down on the Martian surface.
Now I’ve reported on what InSight will do now that it’s there back in SFN 224 but
briefly, InSight will not be a rover, it is an interplanetary seismometer.
It will stay in one spot and listen to the Martian interior for signs of Marsquakes.
InSight stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations and it will study the
deep interior of mars and try to help us understand how rocky planets are formed and shaped in
our solar system.
In addition to listening for any seismic activity, it will also measure the rate of heat flow
from the interior, estimate the size of Mars’ core and look into whether the core is liquid
or solid.
This data would be the first of its kind for Mars and what’s really cool is that InSight
will also be able to listen for meteor strikes anywhere on the red planet, and astronomers
think the lander could detect between 10 and 200 events where meteors hit the Martian surface.
But one of the stars of the show on Monday was the cubesats.
This was a test concept for NASA, they deployed two cubesats called Mars Cube One, or MarCO,
as secondary payloads with the InSight spacecraft in May and flew by Mars as InSight landed
on the planet.
They were designed to provide real-time telemetry of what was going on with the decent as it
happened.
Without these cubesats, we would have had to wait for hours before we found out if the
lander made it or not.
And there were a lot of stages to the landing.
As NASA likes to say (a lot), landing on Mars is hard, while there is an atmosphere to slow
down the spacecraft, it’s thik enough to burn it up but too thin for a parachute to
do all the slowing down, so they break it up into stages: first a heat shield hits the
atmosphere, then a parachute deploys to slow it more, but that’s not enough, so 12 retro
thrusters fire to slow it down even more till it touches down.
NASA calls it the ‘Seven Minutes of Terror’ and it’s pretty amazing actually.
It hadn’t occurred to me before, but NASA is the only ones to ever successfully land
things on Mars, and it’s done it many times now.
I think that’s pretty impressive.
Anyway, once the process starts, it’s all automatic because the distance between Earth
and Mars is too great for real time control so the MarCO Cubesats monitored every stage
of the descent and relayed confirmation of the various critical points during the landing.
The success of the MarCO satellites points to more uses of this kind of relay in future
missions and proved they could invaluable in deep space missions.
The MarCO primary mission will last about two more weeks.
The two spacecraft will return other data collected during the flyby, including telemetry
about the health of the cubesats themselves and potentially other images of Mars taken
during close approach.
Before they left Mars, they took this picture to say goodbye to InSight and the Red Planet.
You can see the high-gain, X-band antenna off to the right.
Once InSight was safely down on the surface it took this image of its new home.
This is where it will spend its entire mission, measuring the interior of Mars heat and listening
for quakes and meteor strikes.
So congratulations to the Mars InSight and MarCO satellite teams on another successful
Mars landing.
Next up, for NASA anyway, is the Mars 2020 rover scheduled to land on Mars in February
2021.
I’ll Keep you posted.
Well that’s it for this episode Space Fans, SFN is sponsored by OPT Telescopes a world
leader in telescopes and accessories and Deep Astronomy Patreon Patrons.
Thanks to all of you for keeping SFN going.
Thanks to all of you for watching as as always, Keep Looking Up!