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

[[Image:Insight Landing ellipse.jpeg|thumb|center|400px|Landing ellipse in Elysium Planitia, Mars Odyssey orbiter image, NASA/JPL-Caltech]]

* [https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/mars-cube-one-cubesat-launch-with-mars-insight/ Mars-bound CubeSats Launch With NASA’s InSight] lots of details about the cube sats - size, statistics, phtograph of a deployed cube sat on a bench etc.

* [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46332684 InSight Diary: The silence of space] - exceedingly sensitive seismometers, so senstivie they couldn't find anywhere on Earth quiet enough to test them, when the tested them deep in a mine in the Black forest in Germany the strongest signal was from the sea, hundreds of miles away - which would be far stronger than any feeble Mars quakes. They could only really test them once they were in flight on the way to Mars.

NASA TV are doing an extensive program about the Insight lander today (25th November), so if you want to watch a video and hear the experts talk about it, just go to the live feed, it seems to be an all day event so there are hours of streaming video about it.