Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Mars InSight Lander on Course for Monday Touchdown
After a six-month voyage from Earth, NASA’s InSight Mars lander, streaking through space at at some 12,300 mph, will slam into the thin martian atmosphere Monday afternoon to begin a nail-biting six-and-a-half-minute descent to the surface, kicking off a billion-dollar mission to probe the red planet’s hidden interior.
“The goal of InSight is nothing less than to better understand the birth of the Earth, the birth of the planet we live on, and we’re going to do that by going to Mars,” said Principle Investigator Bruce Banerdt.
On Earth, plate tectonics and the constantly churning mantle have altered the planet’s deep interior, obscuring its history and evolution. But Mars is a smaller planet and much less active than Earth, retaining the “fingerprints” of those earlier processes.
Nestled inside a flying saucer-shaped “aeroshell” and protected by a state-of-the-art heat shield, InSight will begin its plunge at around 2:47 p.m. EST [19:47 UTC] Monday, enduring braking forces up to 7.4 times the strength of Earth’s gravity as it rapidly slows down and heats up to around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit.
Four minutes later, at an altitude of 7.5 miles and now moving at a still supersonic 928 mph, a 39-foot-wide parachute will unfurl, inflating with a force of 15,000 pounds per square foot to slow the craft to a much more manageable 295 mph or so.
The no-longer-needed heat shield then will be jettisoned, exposing the bottom of the lander to the environment, and 10 seconds after that, its three landing legs will unfold and lock in place.
A few seconds later, about one minute before touchdown, InSight’s downward-looking radar will be activated, measuring the spacecraft’s altitude and rate of descent and feeding those data to the lander’s flight computer.
Finally, less than a mile above the surface and descending at about 134 mph, InSight will be released from the aeroshell and parachute to fall freely on its own.
One second later, twelve small rocket motors will fire up, each one generating about 68 pounds of thrust as they pulse on and off 10 times per second, first moving the spacecraft to one side to avoid the falling parachute and aeroshell.
Nulling out its horizontal velocity and slowing to about 5 mph, InSight is expected to touch down on Elysium Planitia around 2:54 p.m. [19:54 UTC], roughly 2 p.m. local time on Mars.
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Watch Closely as NASA Deploys the World's Biggest Parachute at Supersonic Speeds
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Watch closely as NASA deploys the world's biggest parachute at supersonic speeds
NASA engineers have launched a gigantic parachute as big as a size of a house[sic] at record speed to prepare for its Mars 2020 mission.
The object, dubbed ASPIRE (Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiments), unfolded from a small cylinder to a massive parachute, weighing over 80 kilograms (180 pounds), in just four-tenths of a second.
ASPIRE was tested earlier this year in September. NASA hopes that it can be used to slow down a spacecraft carrying the Mars 2020 rover so that the vehicle can slow in the upper atmosphere. The parachute will then detach and the spacecraft will fire up rockets, hover over the surface and then lower the rover to the surface of the Red Planet.
[...] The parachute was carried aboard a Black Brant IX sounding rocket travelling at nearly twice the speed of sound (343 meters per second). After two minutes, the rocket reached the appropriate altitude of 38 kilometers - where the atmosphere of Earth thins and mimics the one on Mars - and released the parachute.
[...] In one swift expansion, it created a drag force of a whopping 311,375 Newtons (70,000 pounds of force). ASPIRE's canopy stretches over 20 meters in diameter and is made out of nylon and Kevlar. It's held together by over three million stitches and carried by threads of Technora, a strong synthetic fibre.
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Watch Online | Landing – NASA's InSight Mars Lander
NASA InSight Mars geological survey landing at 11 AM PST / 2PM EST / 18:00 UTC today - watch live!
Source: https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/timeline/landing/watch-online/
Previously: NASA's InSight Mars Mission Rescheduled for 2018
NASA Launches InSight Mission to Study the Interior of Mars
CubeSats -- En Route to Mars with InSight -- Snap Another "Pale Blue Dot" Image
MarCO CubeSat Takes Image of Mars From 12.8 Million Kilometers Away
Mars InSight Lander on Course for Monday Touchdown at 2:54 PM EST (19:54 UTC)
NASA's InSight successfully lands on Mars after 'seven minutes of terror'
NASA's latest Mars lander, InSight, successfully touched down on the surface of the Red Planet this afternoon, surviving an intense plunge through the Martian atmosphere. It marks the eighth picture-perfect landing on Mars for NASA, adding to the space agency's impressive track record of putting spacecraft on the planet. And now, InSight's two-year mission has begun, one that entails listening for Marsquakes to learn about the world's interior.
InSight successfully lands on Mars
[Also Covered By]:
[Mission Page]: InSight Mars Lander
MarCO CubeSats Successfully Collect and Relay Data During Mars Flyby
Success of Tiny Mars Probes Heralds New Era of Deep-Space Cubesats
The era of the interplanetary cubesat has definitively dawned.
Less than seven months ago, no tiny spacecraft had ever voyaged beyond Earth orbit. But two briefcase-size probes just blazed a trail all the way to Mars, covering 301 million deep-space miles (484 million kilometers) and beaming home data from NASA's InSight lander during the latter's successful touchdown on the Red Planet Monday (Nov. 26).
The tiny NASA craft, known as MarCO-A and MarCO-B, even photographed Mars and helped researchers collect some data about the planet's atmosphere during their flyby, mission team members said.
Hopefully this new era will include flybys or orbits of all the large asteroids and dwarf planets (Eris, Sedna, Makemake, Haumea, etc.)
Previously: NASA to Focus on Small Satellites
NASA Selects CubeSat and SmallSat Mission Concept Studies
NASA's InSight Mars Mission Rescheduled for 2018
NASA Launches InSight Mission to Study the Interior of Mars
CubeSats -- En Route to Mars with InSight -- Snap Another "Pale Blue Dot" Image
MarCO CubeSat Takes Image of Mars From 12.8 Million Kilometers Away
Mars InSight Lander on Course for Monday Touchdown at 2:54 PM EST (19:54 UTC)
Watch Online | Landing – NASA's InSight Mars Lander
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @04:14AM (2 children)
Mars landings are tricky to get right. It takes a circus-like series of steps with no do-overs. I'm sure everyone at JPL are biting their nails.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @05:19AM (1 child)
Hope they have their feet-metres per second sorted this time. :)
"Bah, we use elephant tails per whale heartbeat to calibrate our rate of descent."
"Oh, African or Asian elephant? And, er, Blue Whale or Minky?"
* splat *
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @09:06AM
That does nothelp if your descent vehole is a bowl of pettunias.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 26 2018, @04:50AM (6 children)
The old joke with "Easy to look for the key under the street lamp, even if I lost it somewhere in the park".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Monday November 26 2018, @05:31AM (5 children)
Now, now, c0lo! Let us not demean the Red Planet! After all, despite being named for the God of War, Mars has yet to develop an alt-right. In fact, now that I think of it, being the Red(-pillar) Planet, and names after Ares, the God of war and man-type stuff, or αρετή, after the god himself, Άρης, it would be fitting if the demi-god child Elon Musk saw fit to encourage all the "white separatist" types to join him on a "colonizing" mission to Mars. And then we will see just how superior they are. But at least they would be gone, and we could still report that no intelligent life has been found on the planet.
Besides, missions to Venus tend not to last very long (less than 2 hours) [wikipedia.org] Now we see why their pillars are red. Stamina, and dedication, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @05:35AM (1 child)
Trump Mars spaceforest deranged
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday November 26 2018, @08:56AM
Stop that, AC, you'll go blind! Potatoes, or no potatoes!
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @07:26AM (1 child)
Wow, anticrust, does this come naturally to you or is it medication induced? Either way, it's just not very good.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 26 2018, @11:04AM
Don't let the good to be the enemy of very good; our times are interesting, you may not live to get either of them. Carpe diem, AC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 26 2018, @10:55AM
Far from me. Look closer, I think you'll find that, at the best, the "fingers" (their prints to be exact) were the subject. Mars just happens to be a part of the story context, the mise-en-scène so to speak.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford