Probe From NASA's InSight Lander Burrows Into the Soil of Mars (space.com) 83
"The 'mole' aboard NASA's InSight Mars lander has encountered stiff resistance on its first subsurface sojourn beneath the surface of the Red Planet," reports Space.com:
In a major mission milestone, InSight's Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument burrowed underground for the first time on Feb. 28. After 400 hammer blows over the course of four hours, the instrument apparently got between 7 inches and 19.7 inches (18 to 50 centimeters) beneath the red dirt -- but obstacles slowed its progress, mission team members said...
The $850 million InSight lander -- whose name is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- touched down on Nov. 26. The spacecraft aims to map the Red Planet's interior in unprecedented detail. It will do this primarily by characterizing "marsquakes" and other vibrations with a suite of supersensitive seismometers, which was built by a consortium led by the French space agency CNES; and measuring subsurface heat flow with HP3, which DLR provided.
"I'm digging Mars!" announced NASA's official Twitter feed for the InSight robotic lander, adding "My self-hammering mole has started burrowing in, and my team is poring over the data..."
The $850 million InSight lander -- whose name is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- touched down on Nov. 26. The spacecraft aims to map the Red Planet's interior in unprecedented detail. It will do this primarily by characterizing "marsquakes" and other vibrations with a suite of supersensitive seismometers, which was built by a consortium led by the French space agency CNES; and measuring subsurface heat flow with HP3, which DLR provided.
"I'm digging Mars!" announced NASA's official Twitter feed for the InSight robotic lander, adding "My self-hammering mole has started burrowing in, and my team is poring over the data..."
400 hammer blows over 4 hours (Score:2)
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That sounds like a problem. How are we going to get all that construction equipment to Mars? Is there a rental place nearby?
Re:Wait a minute.. (Score:5, Informative)
It should be easy to dig on Mars.
Who said that? A lot of the planet has exposed bedrock just like earth that is impossible to "dig" through.
Also, this is just a lander with a small impact drill. It wouldn't take much more than a good sized rock to slow it down or stop it. You can see such rocks laying around on the ground near the lander.
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It should be easy to dig on Mars.
Who said that? A lot of the planet has exposed bedrock just like earth that is impossible to "dig" through.
Also, this is just a lander with a small impact drill. It wouldn't take much more than a good sized rock to slow it down or stop it. You can see such rocks laying around on the ground near the lander.
Which is why people would be useful on the surface. They can look for more opportune ways to break through the surface, and even wield tools that no little rover can.
Re:Wait a minute.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is why people would be useful on the surface. They can look for more opportune ways to break through the surface, and even wield tools that no little rover can.
If you can send people, you can also send a massively bigger rover with heavy tools.
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Which is why people would be useful on the surface. They can look for more opportune ways to break through the surface, and even wield tools that no little rover can.
If you can send people, you can also send a massively bigger rover with heavy tools.
But people will still be more efficient at picking the correct place to drill, and not having a delay waiting for responses from base.
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But people will still be more efficient at picking the correct place to drill, and not having a delay waiting for responses from base.
I don't believe people are more efficient if you include all the time and effort to transport them to Mars and back, and keeping them alive during their stay.
The InSight rover is less than 1000 pounds, costs less than $1 billion, and construction started in 2014. Let's compare that to a realistic human mission.
It's a lander [Re:Wait a minute..] (Score:2)
The InSight rover is less than 1000 pounds....
Lander. It doesn't rove.
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They could have had both. If they had built a trencher instead of a driller, they could have used the trencher to pull the lander to a slightly different spot. It couldn't go as deep, but a drill gets to look at exactly the one spot that is directly under the semi-random landing spot.
Trench or drill [Re:It's a lander ] (Score:2)
Trenching has been done with Viking and Phoenix. (And wheel-trenching with the MER rovers) It's interesting, but doesn't get you very deep below surface.
And no, I doubt you can move a one-ton lander by reaching out and pulling on dirt. The best you might do, if you have a really strong arm, and can grab onto the surface very very strongly, would be to tip it over.
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Lander. It doesn't rove.
It's not landing either. Sitter ?
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Exploration has never been about efficiency. At the governmental & bureaucratic level we've become so risk-adverse that we seem to be simply running in place. If we'd taken the same risk aversion to atmospheric flight, we'd still be waiting for our first cross-atlantic attempt. Sure, I could find a drone to fly up that mountain - why should I risk life & limb by going myself? Americans once threw everything they owned into wagons to go West, never knowing if they'd survive the enormous risk. We limi
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The InSight rover is less than 1000 pounds, costs less than $1 billion, and construction started in 2014. Let's compare that to a realistic human mission.
A realistic human mission will take about $200 Billion and 30 years for four people to have four months of boots on Mars. That equates to about 200 robot mission to Mars and if the past mars missions, those will get at least a year of service each. We'll assume that's over the same 30 years. This equates to 1.33 man years of research on Mars* versus 200 robot years. Sort of boils down to "Are humans 150 times more efficient than robots at the tasks needed on Mars?" Perhaps on Earth, but there is a lot of ti
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Cold at night [Re:Wait a minute..] (Score:3)
How efficient do you think people would be when the temperature is -100 F? Because that's summer on Mars.
Actually, summer daytime temperatures on Mars get into the double-digit numbers C in the mid latitudes. (That's "above 50 F" for you Farenheiters).
Nights get pretty cold, though.
https://www.space.com/16907-what-is-the-temperature-of-mars.html
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People on the surface wouldn't wield tools with their hands to break through the surface anyway. And landing people (and all they need to survive and to return) means so much more mass that you could just as well deliver a massive automated drilling rig with no people needed.
The only reason to land people is if you want to land people. And wanting to do this is a fully justified reason to do it. There's no need to find hilarious excuses to do so.
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How would you deliver a massive automated drilling rig? Is there an automated drilling rig on Earth that requires no people and no maintenance? If not, why not?
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Because on Earth using people as universal bio-robots is much cheaper. What is so hard to understand about that?
Back in the Apollo days each man hour on the Moon did cost about $1B. If crews for drilling rigs on Earth would cost that much per man hour, there would be only automated drilling rigs. What do you think?
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When your teleporter pad finally proves itself—less than one melted person per thousand—visit us again, and we'll talk.
That's very expensive for four days total work on the ground when you decide not
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Space nutter reporting for duty. The point of sending machines like this is to characterize the Martian environment so that by the time humans arrive there will be as few surprises as possible. How hard is the soil? How easy is it to get at ice? Is the soil radioactive (which would be at the same time bad news and good news)? Is the soil differentiated into layers near the surface?
The more of these questions our robots can answer now, the better our design of habitats will be.
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Wait, why is this needed? You guys assured me that colonizing Mars is not only possible, but within the reach of current technology. How would you know that unless you already did all the necessary research?
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Simple, ant grunt could tell you that:
Proper
Planning
Prevents
Piss
Poor
Performance
Here on Earth, companies spend years planning for new endeavors. have you ever heard of a mine being started without drilling test holes or sounding out the layers of strata beneath them?
More similar to Mars, do you think that the organizations that send people to study Antarctica just drop them off on the runway and say, "We've done this before, no planning needed, just dig a hole and lay in it, we'll be back for you later"?
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The point of sending machines like this is to characterize the Martian environment so that by the time humans arrive
Reporter is interviewing an elderly farmer:
Q: Why do you keep plow horses?
A: I need to grow a crop of oats every year.
Q: And why do you need to raise a crop of oats every year?
A:To feed the plow horses
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Dude, the Nazis all got killed in the 1940s. Didn't you get the memo?
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That's what they WANT us to believe. The truth is that they are on the other side of the moon riding dinosaurs. Didn't you watch the documentary?
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I just enjoy lying.
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Thank you for that AC! Good call-out
If I ever need to create a new Slashdot account, I think I'll go with "Self-Hammering Mole"
Anthropomorphism (Score:4, Insightful)
So I guess the Insight lander has a personality and a whole PR team to relay its hopes and feelings to its fans and the interested public. If I ask, maybe it will send me an autographed picture. I wonder if Insight writes in block letters or cursive.
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Yes - this first-person stuff is just really annoying. "My science team..." urgh. The probe doesn't "own" those people - it's the other way around. "I'm working a menial job to provide low level data for a team of brilliant research scientists" would be better. But really? No. Let's no anthropomorphize this stuff - it's beyond annoying. If/when we get true AI, then the computer can speak in the first person...otherwise...hell no.
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To be fair, the press cherry-picks quotes to publish such that if you say 99 things in a careful and accurate way but 1 thing in anthropomorphized or over-simplified way, that one is more likely to be quoted because it's more relatable to readers and/or more "catchy". The first job of a reporter/editor is to sell readership quantity, not accuracy. That's life under a market-driven press.
The only solut
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Relax. It's just a cutesy way of having InSight "speak for itself" to the media. If NASA used the standard protocol of having press conferences beamed from JPL, they would run the risk that somebody might be wearing some shirt that triggers liberals. ESA is not going to make that mistake again.
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I find its cute and harmless.
Also a quick search on Google Scholar lead me to a paper supporting anthropomorphising in education for biology so at least, the idea is not totally unscientific.
Learn to fucking write already (Score:2)
Good thing you clarified that. Otherwise we might have thought it was the other kind of subsurface sojourn - the one that happens twenty feet up in the air.
Really? (Score:2)
"between 18 to 50 centimeters"
Wow, those depth sensors must have cost a fortune.
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Somewhere between $18 and $50 million.
I told you (Score:3)
Sheesh! Less than two feet in four hours. I told you they should have sent Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck.
Rocks all the way down? (Score:1)
Mars soil is full of rocks, gee, who would've guessed? What if it hits a rock too big to move? That gizmo may not be strong enough to break through or get around.
Then again, that's what exploration is all about: you don't know what's down there until you actually go. Failu
Dumb question time (Score:2)
Is there a reason NASA chose to use hammer blows to dig down rather than a drill or borer? Did it have to do with the amount of energy required to drill compared to hammering?
It would seem a long, slow drilling process would be more beneficial to making a hole than continually pounding into the ground.
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The hammering process is probably less likely to jam when it encounters rocks.
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The so-called "mole" is an impact pile driver. A small mass is moved up inside the "mole" to gain potential energy by compressing against a spring. After releasing the mass, the potential energy is converted to kinetic energy due to acceleration by the spring. Upon impact with the inside of the base of the "mole", the kinetic energy is converted into work done (force x distance) by a change in momentum (force x time = mass x velocity (before impact) - mass x velocity (after impact)) which causes the "mole"