Based on the angle of the sun looks like plain old lens flare
Agreed, and the hexagon near the umbilical is the reflection from aperture, making that a slam-dunk assessment.
Yes. It's visible in lots of images in different places as the Sun moves around. Not a new thing.
Insight: directed by J.J. Abrams!
sorry, I couldn't resist
Is there a site that lists the dates hammering test have taken place .....
Seems some more surface scraping and hole filling is in order. That spare scoop is certainly proving its worth.
Backup plans, especially with bouncy drill-bots in this case, never hurt. It makes me curious how the soil properties across Mars vary. Obviously they chose Elysium because it seemed a decent balance, and even the best geologists couldn't have anticipated a duracrust curveball.
The arm has been lifted and no part of the mole is visible any longer
cautious optimism!
Seems some more surface scraping and hole filling is in order. That spare scoop is certainly proving its worth.
Backup plans, especially with bouncy drill-bots in this case, never hurt. It makes me curious how the soil properties across Mars vary. Obviously they chose Elysium because it seemed a decent balance, and even the best geologists couldn't have anticipated a duracrust curveball.
Duricrust (or more correctly hardpans) were always a strong possibility. They have been observed at the Viking 1 and 2 and Opportunity landing sites. Nor, over a dynamic surface with a complex history and an area equivalent to all of Earth's continents, should variability be a surprise.
Seems some more surface scraping and hole filling is in order. That spare scoop is certainly proving its worth.
Backup plans, especially with bouncy drill-bots in this case, never hurt. It makes me curious how the soil properties across Mars vary. Obviously they chose Elysium because it seemed a decent balance, and even the best geologists couldn't have anticipated a duracrust curveball.
Duricrust (or more correctly hardpans) were always a strong possibility. They have been observed at the Viking 1 and 2 and Opportunity landing sites. Nor, over a dynamic surface with a complex history and an area equivalent to all of Earth's continents, should variability be a surprise.
What concerns me, on a number of levels, is the possibility that a lot of Mars features multiple duricrust horizons, been laid one on top of another during cyclic wet/dry cycles in freezing environments. That could cause all sorts of issues, both when drilling with percussive drills to any depth, and when digging into such soils for any major earthworks (pardon the term).
Also, when discussing hardpans, I'd say that Curiosity drove a lot of its traverse thus far on top of a deflated hardpan layer. That accounts for the reasons given for the wheel damage, that the stones and rocks in the soil are cemented in and don't just shift when driven over. Instead, they poke into the wheels. The description I've read is of a hard duricrust surface with a thin regolith layer scattered over it in places.
And, of course, Viking 1 discovered a duricrust layer in the soil it landed on. So, a soil structure with duricrust layers has been a known feature of Mars for a long time.
That all suggests that hardpans and duricrusts are going to be common on Mars. I'll be interested in seeing what we find out from further exploration. It's a varied planet, even now; things ought not be the same
everywhere.
New DLR blog update.
Reduced power has meant few opportunities to perform hammering rounds. 3 rounds conducted, forward movement verified only in first round but later round show free mole movement. Pit to be backfilled and compressed before additional hammering.
We have just had another round of hammering, but I don't see any downward movement of the tether.
It seems it's pushing sand out (consistent with the hypothesis of a sand layer with very low cohesion that fills voids as soon as they're created: now the way up is blocked by the arm's pressure, it's mostly oscillating up and down in place while ejecting some material out upon recoil) and can't get a grip on it to go deeper... I wonder whether they've figured out a way out of this, if there is one.
https://twitter.com/landru79/status/1349728016595779586
They're giving up
https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8836/nasa-insights-mole-ends-its-journey-on-mars/the soil’s unexpected tendency to clump deprived the spike-like mole of the friction it needs to hammer itself to a sufficient depth.
After getting the top of the mole about 2 or 3 centimeters under the surface, the team tried one last time to use a scoop on InSight’s robotic arm to scrape soil onto the probe and tamp it down to provide added friction. After the probe conducted 500 additional hammer strokes on Saturday, Jan. 9, with no progress, the team called an end to their efforts.
They will now bury the ribbon cable on the ground to lower its exposure to temperature variations that cause periodic noise in the seismometer data.
Unfortunate they estimate they can't troubleshoot further. I could imagine a scenario in which they dug around the mole's top and pressed directly on it with the arm again, to force it a few centimeters down again and hope it caught on more cohesive material further down. Perhaps it just takes too long and consumes too much power from the already very dusty panels to constitute a workable scenario.
Efforts to robotically drill or dig into planetary surfaces have not been very successful. Somebody could compile a list of examples.
cautious optimism!
