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
Related Stories
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.
You may recall that back in November, NASA's Insight lander began drilling down into the surface of Mars hoping to reach a depth of 16 feet (5 meters) with an instrument affectionately dubbed "The Mole"
NASA scientists now have a plan to hopefully determine the cause of the Lander's shallow shoveling.
Although the mission went well, at the last moment the heat probe only managed to reach a depth of 13cm before progress stalled.
There are a couple of theories for what is causing this.
1) The probe may have simply hit a rock.
2) The soil around the heat probe may be too 'slick'. "(The mole needs a certain amount of soil friction to dig; otherwise, it will simply bounce in place.)"
Unfortunately right now, it is simply impossible to be sure. This is because the Insight Lander's support structure blocks the onboard camera's view of the instrument.
So, the mission team plans to use the lander's robotic arm to lift that support structure out of the way.
According to Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, this will allow the scientists to "gather more information and try at least one solution."
The lifting maneuver, which the team has been practicing with mock-ups at JPL, will begin on the Red Planet in late June. And InSight's handlers will proceed carefully.
"Over the course of a week, the arm will lift the structure in three steps, taking images and returning them so that engineers can make sure the mole isn't being pulled out of the ground while the structure is moved," NASA officials wrote in the same statement. "If removed from the soil, the mole can't go back in."
The investigation process itself will add friction to the soil near the mole according to Tilman Spohn of the German Aerospace Center which built the mole.
Updated information on the Mars InSight Lander's Mole probe.
NASA has now announced that the plan to investigate the cause of the mole's depthless digging was implemented successfully and they have the results
As was previously reported the Mars InSight Lander's heat probe was only able to reach a depth of 13cm in its attempts to drill to a final depth of five meters. Earlier this month NASA announced their plan to move the lander's support structure out of the way so it could view the hole and determine the problem.
Initially, the InSight team thought that the mole had hit a rock and was blocked. But after analysis and experimentation with a mock-up lander at test-bed facilities, they came up with another explanation: a cavity in the soil.
They couldn't be sure without seeing into the hole, which lead to the June effort to move aside the lander support structure.
Now that the mole's support structure has been moved aside, camera's[sic] on the lander's instrument arm are able to see into the hole. And they've confirmed what the InSight team suspected. A small pit has formed around the mole, depriving it of the necessary friction to penetrate deeper.
"The images coming back from Mars confirm what we've seen in our testing here on Earth," said HP3 Project Scientist Mattias Grott of DLR. "Our calculations were correct: This cohesive soil is compacting into walls as the mole hammers."
This is important because the mole works differently from your garden variety post hole digger and
relies on friction with the [soil] surrounding it to hammer its way into the ground [...]. Without that friction, the mole will just recoil from the hammering action, and bounce around in the hole, rather than penetrate.
This was actually the hoped for result as a large blocking rock would have effectively been game over. NASA will next put into action its plan to attempt to remedy the situation
The robotic instrument arm has a small scoop on the end, and they intend to use that scoop to pat on the hole and compress the soil, hopefully eliminating the cavity.
There is a NASA Q&A page on the mole's situation available as well.
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.
For those tracking the twisting tale of the NASA Mars InSight Lander's plucky heat probe nicknamed 'the mole' - there is some good news! NASA reports:
A bit of good news from #Mars: our new approach of using the robotic arm to push the mole appears to be working! The teams @NASAJPL/@DLR_en are excited to see the images and plan to continue this approach over the next few weeks. 💪 #SaveTheMole
FAQ: https://t.co/wnhp7c1gPT pic.twitter.com/5wYyn7IwVo
— NASA InSight (@NASAInSight) March 13, 2020
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 likely reason for its trouble digging is that the fine dry regolith, which is supposed to provide friction to keep the mole from bouncing up on each strike has not been doing so, causing the mole to work its way up and almost out of its hole.
By pushing down on the rod with a shovel-like sampling instrument, NASA is finally making progress getting the mole to dig again.
Direct link to the mission blog: https://www.dlr.de/blogs/en/all-blog-posts/The-InSight-mission-logbook.aspx.
Previously:
Mashing May Mitigate Mars Mole Meandering
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
NASA InSight lander finally pushes its burrowing 'mole' heat probe into Mars:
NASA's InSight lander has had a pretty triumphant run on Mars investigating marsquakes and listening to the weird sounds of the red planet. There's been one sticking point, though: Mars hasn't welcomed the lander's heat probe, known as the "mole."
The heat probe is designed to hammer into Mars, burrow down deep and take the planet's internal temperature, but the probe kept popping out of the ground. NASA and the mole team have spent over a year working through possible solutions for the stuck mole, and they may finally be making some progress.
"After several assists from my robotic arm, the mole appears to be underground. It's been a real challenge troubleshooting from millions of miles away," the NASA InSight account tweeted on Wednesday.
InSight is on a mission to learn more about how rocky planets like Mars and Earth form. The heat probe could provide valuable data for scientists, but even if it doesn't work out, InSight's science mission will still be a success.
There's much more information (including an animated gif) on the mole mission's blog.
The question still remains whether the mole can continue its descent now that it's apparently below Mars' surface.
Previously:
(2020-03-19) NASA Succeeds in Banging Mole With a Shovel
(2020-02-23) Mashing May Mitigate Mars Mole Meandering
(2019-10-29) More Mars Mole Mission Misfortune
(2019-07-06) Mars Mole Mission Rues Resistanceless Regolith
(2019-06-06) NASA to Jack up Insight Lander to Assess Non-Penetrating Probe
(2019-03-05) InSight Impinges Insufficiently in Site
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @02:35AM (1 child)
Should have used an Elong Musky company probe instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @02:45AM
His falls short of 30 centimeters by about 90%.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @02:36AM (4 children)
mooks
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @02:41AM (2 children)
Fuck you, man. Milfs need some loving, too.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @02:47AM (1 child)
Milfs and sons. Suck harder mom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @02:55AM
And then the son-in-law appears:
"You motherfucker! And you bitch, after all that spunk I pumped into your worn-out leaking asshole..."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @03:46PM
SN posters are alliterate.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @03:02AM (2 children)
This is not how it is done. When you are here on Earth and you pay money to have somebody make a hole, they NEVER do this. There could be a reason!
The main option for small things, like water wells 50 feet down, is like a pile driver. The pounding comes from above, not from within.
The main option for deep holes, like oil well that go down 2 miles, is the mud motor. This is probably severe overkill. Fluid would need to be acquired on Mars, which isn't easy, but liquid CO2 might work. Brine also might work, but that is harder to get. Either way, you'd need a lot of power and you'd waste a lot of power.
A gas-driven version of the mud motor might also work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @03:14AM
You gotta keep in mind your on Mars, not on Earth. The *entire* mass of the lander was about 350kg - structure, power, motors, everything. And you're running on solar power with a yield of about 4.5kwh under ideal circumstances. And, of course, vibrations are a really good way to break things in unpredictable ways. And you also have no real idea about what you're drilling into. I'd imagine these are all contributing reasons to why they went for the internal hammering system. Deploy and go. Or not. But, such is the nature of lander missions. You can only accomplish so much without having a human on site to keep things moving or to setup a more sophisticated design from the start.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday February 24 2020, @03:17AM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @03:52AM (1 child)
What's going on here? Some kinda AC virus or sum?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @09:44AM
you need a transformer?
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday February 24 2020, @05:11AM (4 children)
The other concern with pushing on the back of the mole is the risk that it flops flat out of the hole. Once it's lying flat there isn't an obvious way to get it vertical again. Making provisions to allow the arm to retrieve and redeploy the science instruments seems really important now, but it wasn't a consideration when when the probe was built and tested here on Earth. That's a lesson learned.
On a related note, once the mole experiment is placed (successful or not), I hope we can use the arm to dig a trench. Photographs of what's under the surface soil would be interesting data.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday February 24 2020, @11:20AM (3 children)
Maybe I've missed it, but I haven't seen an analysis of why these problems are happening. Are they hitting rocks? Or - what seems more likely - have billions of years of blowing reduced the surface soil to such a fine powder that it is nearly frictionless? For the nearest Earth equivalent: how would the "mole" do, drilling in dirt coated with absolutely dry Sahara sand?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2020, @03:35PM (1 child)
I don't entirely see how frictionless soil would be a problem, but this is definitely not the case. That's based on a misconception about Mars driven by visuals and sci-fi tropes. Turns out the Martian soil is, on average, about about 2% water. Put another way, a cubic foot of Martian soil = ~1 liter of water.
As for the explanations... Imagine you're drilling into a wall. And your drill stops working properly. What's the problem? Power? Overheating? Jam? Mechanical dysfunction? Bit stuck? One of a million other reasons? Now imagine your drill is 40 million miles away, drilling into a surface you know nothing about, with a physical condition you can only measure using potentially faulty sensors, and every action you send your drill takes 6-40 minutes to get a response back. We so desperately need to get humans on Mars if we ever hope to make any sort of meaningful scientific progress.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday February 25 2020, @11:37AM
We just need a nice plasma drill. Or maybe even off-the-shelf equipment like jackhammers that can be manipulated by the rover or robots.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Monday February 24 2020, @11:51PM
There is some discussion about it in JPL's FAQ [nasa.gov].
They believe the problem is, as you've said, that there isn't enough friction for the probe to operate properly. Inside the probe is a linear actuator. The actuator lifts a weight and then slams it into a stop near the bottom of the probe. That should cause the probe to move down and that appears to work. They believe the problem is that the next action, lifting the weight so it can hammer again, causes the actuator to move back up again. This didn't happen in the test conditions because there was sufficient friction between the probe and surrounding soil to hold position during the upstroke.
I was thinking about it after I wrote my comment and I think I was wrong about the probe falling flat being a full failure mode. IIF the arm could manage to dig a shallow angled trench and the probe can be knocked into that trench it might be possible to hammer it laterally to get it digging again. I don't know if that is within the arm's capabilities; it certainly wasn't designed for it.