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

The lander also has a weather station which will be the first one to operate continuously, both day and night on Mars instead of just a few readings a day. It will record temperature, pressure, and wind direction and speed continuously. The reason is because the seismometer will be affected by all these things, it is so sensitive that it will record even deflections of the surface due to passage over of a pressure variation in the atmosphere. As a side effect this means that we have the first continuous measurements from Mars which may well turn up surprising discoveries.

The Marsco cubesats actually were sent to Mars on their own independent trajectories using tiny thrusters for course corrections. The big antenna is used to communicate back to Earth, a design that lets them focus the signal with a flat antenna. There is a small receiver to receive signals from Insight in the base of the satellite that deploys on springs. They communicate independently back to Earth too, the cubesats could fly to Mars by themselves so are true interplanetary cube sats. They are each about the size of a large briefcase and they are technology demonstrators. If they are successful then we may get direct transmission back to Earth of the Entry, Descent and Landing, which would arrive about three hours earlier than the signal relayed from its orbiters which will record it and then retransmit.

: After landing, deploys the seismometer, and then the robotic mole experiments by lifting them onto the surface of Mars. The Viking seismometers were mounted on the spacecraft, this one is placed directly on the surface of Mars. This is hugely speeded up, the actual deployment takes about one month for each instrument and they should be ready to start measurement in spring 2019. Then it depends on how many Mars quakes there are but they expect the main science results in a preliminary way two years from now.

They expect also to detect impacts of Martian meteorites; one of their objectives will be to get a better idea of the impact rate. The seismometers will be able to detect even the one cm or so rise and fall of the surface due to passage over of Phobos the innermost tiny moon of Mars which will also help them make discoveries about the Mars interior.

NASA TV are doing reruns of previous programs about Insight, so if you want to watch a video and hear the experts talk about it, just go to the live feed and you can also look back at earlier programs in the day back a few hours.