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Updated information on the Mars Insight Lander's Mole Mission.
As previously reported, the burrowing instrument on the Mars Insight Lander dubbed the 'mole' ran into trouble back in February.
Various efforts since, including most recently applying pressure to the instrument with the lander's arm scoop, were undertaken to help the little instrument out, and the most recent effort seemed to be succeeding. The lander managed another 3cm of progress! indicating that it had not encountered an impenetrable rock layer after all.
Sadly for the little spade that should, over the weekend the NASA InSight team tweeted the following discouraging news:
"Mars continues to surprise us. While digging this weekend the mole backed about halfway out of the ground. Preliminary assessment points to unexpected soil properties as the main reason. Team looking at next steps.
The stick like probe is supposed to dig its way down to a depth of about 5 meters and take temperature readings.
An image of the issue is here.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30 2019, @04:21AM (2 children)
This is a very typical problem. Curiosity's drilling arm also broke after 15 activations. Getting things to work right is extremely difficult. Getting them to work right tens of millions of away, on a planet we still know surprisingly little about, with a 10 minute delay on all interactions? It's extremely difficult.
In the case of curiosity, a man with some basic tools could have solved the problem in about 5 minutes. Nobody really knows the exact source of the problem (physical debugging under the same conditions is even more difficult than regular operation!) but expected source of the problem was one of the feed mechanisms became jammed somehow. Might have taken nothing more than a duster, a vacuum, and some WD-40 to solve. Instead we spent 7 months coming up with patch-work fixes that didn't really fix the problem, though did allow us to get a little bit more usage out of the drill.
And here? A man with a shovel could achieve in literally a matter of seconds what this lander is trying to do. And these probes aren't exactly cheap - this missions ran about $800 million.
Ultimately I think people vastly overestimate the capability of probes/rovers or how fast they're advancing. They're slow, awkward, unreliable, and extremely difficult to utilize. That we get any science from them at all is a testament to the team at NASA. Yet any one member of that team on the surface of Mars would likely, in a matter of a days, achieve far more than our decades and mounting billions of dollars probes/rovers have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30 2019, @01:46PM (1 child)
We should send one to Venus too!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 31 2019, @06:13AM
Soviets sent many probes to Venus already they don't last long tho.