Watch InSight's successful landing on Mars: Difference between revisions
Watch InSight's successful landing on Mars (edit)
Revision as of 13:32, 26 November 2018
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: 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. They can also detect the orientation of Mars - the RISE (Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment) experiment can detect the slight wobble of the north pole as the gravity of the sun tugs at it during Mars's elliptical orbit which will help decide if Mars has a liquid core and how large it is. [https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/spacecraft/instruments/rise/Studying the Reflexes of Mars]
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.
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