Posted on 08/28/2017 2:38:40 PM PDT by BenLurkin
The InSight project, NASA’s first mission to study the Red Planet’s deep interior, is on track for a 2018 liftoff after needing to be delayed two years due to a technical issue. Scientists hope that it will help explain the formation of rocky planets, including our own.
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InSight is expected to launch sometime in the five weeks following May 8, 2018, with a course charted for its arrival shortly after Thanksgiving. Lockheed Martin Space Systems has constructed the mission’s spacecraft — a stationary lander that will be positioned near the Martian equator — and is currently testing it at a facility near Denver.
“The lander is completed and instruments have been integrated onto it so that we can complete the final spacecraft testing including acoustics, instrument deployments and thermal balance tests,” Stu Spath, spacecraft program manager at Lockheed Martin, said in a statement.
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The first is a seismometer whose development was led by the French space agency CNES in collaboration with several other countries, including the US. It is sensitive enough to detect ground movements that are only half the diameter of a hydrogen atom, and its main goal is to record “marsquakes” (seismic waves) or meteor impacts, which will help reveal information about the interior layers of Mars.
The second is a heat probe that can burrow at least three meters (10 feet) into the surface to measure how much energy comes from the planet’s interior.
(Excerpt) Read more at seeker.com ...
Are they sending Matt Damon?
Is the probing consensual?
It has something to do with Uranus.
This headline is triggering my bung-hole.
Thank God it’s in it’s safe space.
Glad the Ice Warriors have moved on.
*Yawn*
Mars is a big ole boring ball of rust, dig 10 feet and you have more rust.
Go somewhere interesting like Europa or Titan or back to Uranus and/or Neptune.
Does that mean that the landing computations now show an error?
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