I would rely on wind to clean the panels, but if there was no choice but to use the arm or lose the mission, a more effective approach than scraping would probably be to use the arm to bump the panels a few times, hoping to dislodge dust and let it be carried away by the wind. Do it at the windiest time of day - we are getting that information - and hope for the best. But wind will do the trick without any help, I am sure.
Mars could've given us a break, but it didn't. The HP3 mole started hammering itself today, and almost immediately (after just 5 minutes) appears to have encountered a rock. After four hours of hammering, it may have pushed the rock aside, but doesn't appear to have buried itself completely beneath the soil yet, because it's still measuring temperatures consistent with the Martian air temperature. No matter; they'll try again Saturday. Patience is the theme of the InSight mission.
"The team has decided to pause the hammering for now to allow the situation to be analyzed more closely and jointly come up with strategies for overcoming the obstacle," HP3 Principal Investigator Tilman Spohn of DLR wrote in a blog post. He added that the team wants to hold off from further hammering for about two weeks.
Is it possible for Insight's robot arm to sweep off the dust from the solar panels when power levels start to get too low? Is that something they considered when designing it?Might be worth a try at the end of primary mission when the reward is worth the risk involved in using the robot arm to clean the solar panel. It might damage the cells but if they don't try Insight will stop working anyway.
Just the horizon bit of the panorama. There is approximately 1 full image missing from the full coverage of the horizon. Below, a stretched version to show subtle topography more clearly. The sinusoidal shape of the horizon is an artifact (not just due to tilt, it's an error in mosaicking).
But watching the sunset over a vast, red, endless desert might be just as good. Especially when that desert is over 150 million miles away. Thanks to NASA's InSight lander, which has planted itself in Mars' flat, smooth plain Elysium Planitia, you can do just that. The image above was snapped by NASA's most recent Mars transplant on March 10, the robot's 101st day at work on the Martian surface. Stitching a sequence of images by the lander's Instrument Deployment Camera (IDC) shows the splendorous sun setting over the Red Planet and disappearing beyond the horizon.
Engineers are still trying to understand why one of the main instruments on NASA’s InSight Mars lander is stuck just below the Martian surface.In presentations at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference here March 18, project officials said they plan to spend the next few weeks determining why the probe on the Heat and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument, designed to measure the heat flow in the interior of the planet, is stuck about 30 centimeters below the surface, well short of its desired depth of three to five meters.
Maybe somebody can correct me, but I believe that at LPSC last month the InSight PI said that their models predicted between 10-12 seismic events per year. By that time the instrument had been operating for about six weeks, and he said that it was entirely reasonable that it had not yet detected anything--because those 10-12 events are not going to be evenly distributed. You could go months without a Marsquake and then get several in a few weeks.That said, I bet they're really happy they finally detected something. The longer you go, the more you worry that something isn't working.
For InSight, Dust Cleanings Will Yield New ScienceNASA InSight landerThis is NASA InSight's second full selfie on Mars. Since taking its first selfie, the lander has removed its heat probe and seismometer from its deck, placing them on the Martian surface; a thin coating of dust now covers the spacecraft as well.Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech