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from the diggy-diggy-hole,-diggy-diggy-hole dept.
NASA engineers are preparing another tactic to get the troubled "mole" instrument on the Mars InSight lander burrowing into the regolith as intended.
Engineers plan to use the robotic arm on its InSight Mars lander to push a heat flow probe into the surface, acknowledging that they have "few alternatives" if that effort fails.
The Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package instrument team has spent nearly a year trying to get the instrument's probe, or "mole," to burrow into the surface. The mole has an internal hammering mechanism that is designed to drive the probe as deep as five meters into the surface in order to measure the heat flow from the planet's interior.
The mole, though, stopped only about 30 centimeters below the surface. The mission has tried a number of ways to get the mole moving again, including removing the instrument housing on the surface to allow the lander's robotic arm to try and fill in the hole created by the mole, as well as pin the mole to one side of that hole, increasing the friction needed for the mole to work its way into the surface.
In October, that use of the arm to pin the mole worked briefly, allowing the mole to burrow into the surface, only for it to rebound partially out of the hole. A second attempt led to the mole again rebounding partially out of the hole in January.
The mole is a 16-inch-long (40-centimeter) spike equipped with an internal hammering mechanism that relies on friction from the soil to help it dig down. The probe is designed to drag a ribbon-cable like tether behind it as it digs.
While pushing down on the top (back cap) of the probe seems an obvious approach, according to NASA "The team has avoided pushing on the back cap until now to avoid any potential damage to the tether."
Previous Coverage
More Mars Mole Mission Misfortune
Mars Mole Mission Rues Resistanceless Regolith
NASA to Jack up Insight Lander to Assess Non-Penetrating Probe
InSight Impinges Insufficiently in Site
Also at NASA-JPL
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @02:59AM (3 children)
This is why human exploration is where the future is.
People *dramatically* overestimate what we can do with probes. Grand fantasies of the future notwithstanding, our current state of robotics is still just so primitive. An Atlas robot (Boston Dynamic) being able to walk and lift basic objects in extremely controlled ideal conditions running on something like a 20 minute battery is a marvel of robotics today. I don't see how people cannot see the unimaginably large jump between that and getting anything meaningful done on another planet where we still have a very primitive understanding of conditions and where interactions will face a 4-24 minute latency. Oh and of course if anything breaks that the robot cannot repair itself - gg.
NASA tried to create a drill to explore inside of surface rocks. It stopped functioning after 7 activation - most likely cause was a jammed feed. A human could fix the problem in about 30 seconds. Instead they spent many months and countless manhours trying to come up with esoteric solutions that didn't really work all that well. And here - 'jam a pipe into the surface'. Human and a hammer could get this done in again, about 30 seconds. Alternatively, they could fix the problem in probably about as many seconds. Instead we're looking at the exact same scenario happen yet again.
Ultimately it's likely that a small handful of humans on the surface of Mars could not only match but dramatically overcome all the sum achievements of decades of probes and landers, in a matter of weeks if not days. I wouldn't say landers are dumb, but man have we dropped the ball hard. For somebody from 1972 (last year a man -Gene Cernan- walked on the moon) to imagine here we'd be 50 years later talking about landers struggling to stick a pipe in the ground on Mars - and that would, be none, our biggest achievement there...? Reality is so absurd as to be unbelievable. There's a reason Buzz Aldrin has spent much of his life advocating for us to get back to what brought us where we are today, and to get a man on Mars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @03:03AM (1 child)
Oh. And these were the last words spoken from the moon:
Damn, what happened to us?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @03:39AM
America won, Ivan. You think the moon landing was about space exploration. It was never about space exporation. It was about beating the Commie Ruskies and nothing else. Space is and always has been a political pissing contest ever since the Nazis were first to space.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @03:21PM
The gap between what robots and tool-assisted humans can do will shrink. The robot missions to Mars will be far cheaper. NASA just has to get gud.