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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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(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