Watch InSight's successful landing on Mars: Difference between revisions

* For astrobiologists, one particularly interesting thing about this lander is that it is the first one to use a robotic mole. It will drill to a depth of 16 feet (about 5 meters). This is of interest for astrobiology, especially for the search for past life. ExoMars will be able to drill to 2 meters using a different technique and nothing else has been able to drill to anything like this depth. Viking scraped a shallow trench and most just drill mms into rocks. For Insight though it's not an astrobiology mission, it's drilling in order to get a heat profile depending on depth. But it is the first test of robotic mole technology on Mars. The UK [[Beagle 2]] lander was the first and only previous mission to send a small robotic mole to Mars, it landed successfully but sadly wasn't able to open its solar panels and signal back to Earth.

* [http://www.astronomy.com/news/2018/11/nasas-insight-mission-picks-perfectly-dull-landing-site NASA's InSight mission picks perfectly dull landing site] - unlike most landers, the aim is to be dull :). They aren't looking for interesting and varied geology or places where there could be past or present day life, indeed, the more typical and boring it is, the better for their mission objective to find out about Mars's interior.

* [https://earthsky.org/space/site-mars-insight-spacecraft-landing Here’s where InSight will touch down on Monday] photo of landing ellipse

* [https://earthsky.org/space/how-nasa-will-know-when-insight-touches-down How will NASA know when InSight touches down?] - this also mentions an interesting first - first mission to Mars that will deploy cubesats into Mars orbit. They can relay back themselves and they can also maybe even take a photograph of the lander on the surface immediately after a successful landing (or of the crash site if it crashes, to help them figure out what happened). First interplanetary cube sats