Author Topic: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread  (Read 369236 times)

Offline kevin-rf

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #20 on: 08/20/2012 09:52 pm »
Shame they do not have the money to place several widely spaced seismometers for better mapping of Mar's interior. Still, I am excited!
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Offline Sparky

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #21 on: 08/20/2012 10:14 pm »
Shame they do not have the money to place several widely spaced seismometers for better mapping of Mar's interior. Still, I am excited!
If ExoMars still happens via the Russians, that might be a possibility...

Offline catdlr

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #22 on: 08/20/2012 11:04 pm »
Digging Deep with NASA's Next Mars Lander

Published on Aug 20, 2012 by JPLnews:

Mission team members for InSight, the new Mars lander mission selected by NASA to launch in 2016, explain how the spacecraft will advance our knowledge of Mars' history and rocky planet evolution.

« Last Edit: 08/20/2012 11:05 pm by catdlr »
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Offline TheMightyM

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #23 on: 08/21/2012 12:38 am »
Was this seen as the safest choice? I was more excited about TiME tbh.

Yup. InSight was judged to be the least likely to go over budget, which is not surprising as it's essentially Phoenix with different instruments.

Offline catdlr

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #24 on: 08/21/2012 01:12 am »
Drilling Specific Information- InSight's HP3

PASADENA, Calif. - On Aug. 20, NASA announced the selection of InSight, a new Discovery-class mission that will probe Mars at new depths by looking into the deep interior of Mars.

"We are certainly excited, but our veterans on this team know the drill," said Tom Hoffman, project manager for InSight from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Which is fortunate, because one of the great things we'll get to do on Mars is drill below the surface."

Drilling underneath the red Martian topsoil will be courtesy of InSight's HP3, or Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package - one of the four instruments the Mars lander will carry. Made by the German Aerospace Center, or DLR, HP3 will get below Mars' skin by literally pounding it into submission with a 14-inch (35-centimeter), hollowed-out, electromechanically-festooned stake called the Tractor Mole.

"The Tractor Mole has an internal hammer that rises and falls, moving the stake down in the soil and dragging a tether along behind it," said Sue Smrekar, deputy project scientist for InSight from JPL. "We're essentially doing the same thing any Boy or Girl Scout would do on a campout, but we're putting our stake down on Mars."

The German-built mole will descend up to 16 feet (five meters) below the surface, where its temperature sensors will record how much heat is coming from Mars' interior, which reveals the planet's thermal history.

"Getting well below the surface gets us away from the sun's influence and allows us to measure heat coming from the interior," said Smrekar. "InSight is going take heartbeat and vital signs of the Red Planet for an entire Martian year, two Earth years. We are really going to have an opportunity to understand the processes that control the early planetary formation."

InSight stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. The mission is led by W. Bruce Banerdt of JPL. InSight's science team includes U.S. and international co-investigators from universities, industry and government agencies. Along with DLR, the French space agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, or CNES, is also contributing an instrument to the two-year scientific mission.

InSight builds on spacecraft technology used in NASA's highly successful Phoenix lander mission, which was launched to the Red Planet in 2007 and determined that water ice exists near the surface in the Martian polar regions.

Along with providing an onboard geodetic instrument to determine the planet's rotation axis, plus a robotic arm and two cameras used to deploy and monitor instruments on the Martian surface, JPL performs project management for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Discovery Program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver will build the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

A web video about the Insight mission is online at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1121 . More information about InSight is at: http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov .

As a complement to NASA's larger "flagship" planetary science explorations, the Discovery Program goal is to achieve outstanding results by launching many smaller missions using fewer resources and shorter development times. The main objective is to enhance our understanding of the solar system by exploring the planets, their moons, and small bodies such as comets and asteroids. The program also seeks to improve performance through the use of new technology and broaden university and industry participation in NASA missions.

More information about the Discovery Program is at: http://discovery.nasa.gov .

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
[email protected]

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-252&cid=release_2012-252

Web Links to German Aerospace Center:

http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10333/623_read-818/

Specific to Drilling package HP3:

http://www.dlr.de/irs/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-5960/10970_read-25032/

« Last Edit: 08/21/2012 01:16 am by catdlr »
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Offline manboy

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #25 on: 08/21/2012 02:22 am »
I thought there wasn't enough money for another lander for a 2016/2018 launch?
« Last Edit: 08/21/2012 02:22 am by manboy »
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Offline TheMightyM

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #26 on: 08/21/2012 02:31 am »
I thought there wasn't enough money for another lander for a 2016/2018 launch?

Different pot of money. InSight is a Discovery mission, which is to say that the target is not at all restricted to Mars. Just so happened that a Mars geophysics mission beat out a comet sampling mission and a Titan ocean floater.

You are correct that there apparently isn't enough money in NASA's proposed new Mars program budget for a lander in 2016 or 2018.

Offline Blackstar

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #27 on: 08/21/2012 03:50 am »
Shame they do not have the money to place several widely spaced seismometers for better mapping of Mar's interior. Still, I am excited!

InSight is the latest iteration of a proposed mission from a few years ago called Cerberus, which would have landed three Phoenix-sized spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Too expensive, would not have fit within the New Frontiers cost cap.

Offline TheFallen

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #28 on: 08/21/2012 05:43 am »
Was this seen as the safest choice? I was more excited about TiME tbh.

You ain't the only one.

Offline Skyrocket

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #29 on: 08/21/2012 09:44 am »
Does anyone know, which launcher is baselined for this mission?


Offline GClark

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #30 on: 08/21/2012 01:41 pm »
Does anyone know, which launcher is baselined for this mission?



The project summary simply says 4-meter ELV.

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Offline InvalidAttitude

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #31 on: 08/21/2012 03:23 pm »
Any hint about the landing site?

Offline Robotbeat

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #32 on: 08/21/2012 06:59 pm »
Apparently, InSight won:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nasa-will-send-robot-drill-to-mars-in-2016/2012/08/20/43bf1980-eaef-11e1-9ddc-340d5efb1e9c_story.html

A good day for those studying the history of the space plasma physics on Mars... we shall soon know much more of the state and history of the interior of Mars and thus its ancient magnetohydrodynamic dynamo. I wrote a paper on that topic for the Space Physics course I took last year.
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Offline JohnFornaro

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #33 on: 08/21/2012 08:00 pm »
From:

http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/#more

[/quote]The InSight lander will be equipped with two science instruments that will conduct the first "check-up" of Mars in more than 4.5 billion years, measuring its "pulse"...[/quote]

Which is to say that this mission is the uhhh.... second check up mission.  Is there a link for whoever did the uhhh...first checkup?
Sometimes I just flat out don't get it.

Offline arachnitect

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #35 on: 08/22/2012 12:06 am »
Any hint about the landing site?

They want a flat, equatorial site.  Best candidate right now is Elysium Planitia...not that far (relatively) from MSL's Gale Crater. 

Offline catdlr

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Offline bolun

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #37 on: 08/24/2012 07:58 pm »
http://www.bis.gov.uk/ukspaceagency/news-and-events/2012/Aug/new-mars-mission-to-take-first-look-at-whats-going-on-deep-inside-the-red-planet

Quote
A UK Space Agency-funded instrument, designed to investigate the interior structure and processes of Mars, has been selected to travel to the Red Planet on NASA’s newly announced InSight mission.

Quote
The UK-funded SEIS-SP is a Seismometer that will listen for "marsquakes" and use this information to map the boundaries between the rock layers inside Earth's neighbour. This will help determine if the planet has a liquid or solid core, and provide some clues as to why its surface is not divided up into tectonic plates as on Earth. Detailed knowledge of the interior of Mars in comparison to Earth will help scientists understand better how terrestrial planets form and evolve. The SEIS-SP will be provided by space scientists at Imperial College London and the University of Oxford.

Offline Comga

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #38 on: 08/24/2012 10:33 pm »
Rep. Schiff Hails Announcement of New Mission to Mars

Pasadena, CA -- [snip]..Schiff said. “Also, by announcing this new mission soon after the landing of Curiosity, NASA will help to preserve the entry, descent and landing capabilities that were so spectacularly demonstrated by the scientists at JPL, whose talents will be crucial to future planetary exploration.”

Is this correct, enthusiatic loose interpretation, or just more blather?
"Phoenix technology" included neither of the new, advanced EDL technologies of MSL, dynamic flight control during entry and the sky crane landing.  Is InSight going to try to incorporte the steering entry?

It could be hoped that JPL is held to the cost cap, but I doubt it. We could start a poll on our guesses for the final cost, $400-450M, $450-500M, up to >$1G. 

InSight funding is on top of $8.5B that Caltech is getting to run JPL for five years, ~5% of the NASA budget.  (NASA CONTRACT RELEASE: C12-042 8/17/2012)
What kind of wastrels would dump a perfectly good booster in the ocean after just one use?

Offline Blackstar

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Re: The InSight Mission to Mars Master Thread
« Reply #39 on: 08/25/2012 12:48 pm »
1-Is this correct, enthusiatic loose interpretation, or just more blather?

2-It could be hoped that JPL is held to the cost cap, but I doubt it. We could start a poll on our guesses for the final cost, $400-450M, $450-500M, up to >$1G. 

1-It is mostly correct. Note that he's not talking about the technology, he's essentially talking about the team of EDL experts. Most of those people were going to be out of a job. Now many of them will work on InSight. Not all, because InSight is less sophisticated. But this is an important resource to preserve.

2-What is the basis for your skepticism? This is a proven lander design, and the blueprints already exist. The instruments are being provided by European sources. Note that both GRAIL and InSight were selected because of a belief that their cost estimates were sound (and both were based upon existing spacecraft). GRAIL actually came in under budget. Can you cite a single Discovery mission that doubled in price?
« Last Edit: 08/25/2012 12:49 pm by Blackstar »

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