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posted by martyb on Tuesday March 05 2019, @10:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the Mole's-repeated-red-rock-rapping-rejected dept.

The NASA InSight Lander's drill, nicknamed 'The Mole', was unable to penetrate subsurface rocks in its first drilling session.

The instrument known as HP3 (Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package) attempted to drill down on February 28th. In a marathon 4 hour hammering session, that sadly still did not meet Susan Decker's standards, The Mole was able to push aside one subsurface rock at a depth of 13 centimeters (~5 hockey pucks stacked vertically) and reach a final depth of 50 centimeters/1.6 feet (a stack of 20 pucks) before encountering a second rock that it was unable to push aside even after ~4,000 hammer blows.

Another four-hour drilling session should happen soon, but mission planners have to wait for the system to cool down first. The hammering action causes friction, which in turn generates heat; several hours of hammering requires a two-day cooling period. Ideally, as the HP3 experiment proceeds toward the goal of drilling a hole 3 to 5 meters (10 to 16 feet) deep, the project will involve a series of four-hour drilling sessions, followed by two-day cooling periods and a day to take temperature readings.

The purpose of the drilling is to take temperature readings along the depth of the hole in 15 minute intervals to measure heat flow from the interior of Mars.

Here's hoping for more positive news after the next drilling session.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @02:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 06 2019, @02:11PM (#810697)

    Well, hockey rinks just seemed silly at that scale.

    But which? NHL or international? At least we would have solved the Canadians or Finns problems right there!