NASA InSight’s ‘Mole’ Is Out of Sight



Now that the heat probe is just below the Martian surface, InSight’s arm will scoop some additional soil on top to help it keep digging so it can take Mars’ temperature.


NASA’s InSight lander continues working to get its “mole”
– a 16-inch-long (40-centimeter-long) pile driver and heat probe – deep below
the surface of Mars. A camera on InSight’s arm recently took images of the now
partially filled-in “mole hole,” showing only the device’s science
tether protruding from the ground.

Sensors embedded in the tether are designed to measure
heat flowing from the planet once the mole has dug at least 10 feet (3 meters)
deep. The mission team has been working to help the mole burrow to at least
that depth so that it can take Mars’ temperature.

The mole was designed so that loose soil would flow around
it, providing friction against its outer hull so that it can dig deeper;
without this friction, the mole just bounces in place as it hammers into the
ground. But the soil where InSight landed is different than what previous
missions have encountered: During hammering, the soil sticks together, forming
a small pit around the device instead of collapsing around it and providing the
necessary friction.

This footage from Aug. 19, 2019, shows a replica of InSight scraping soil with a scoop on the end of its robotic arm in a test lab at JPL. A replica of the “mole” – the lander’s self-hammering heat probe – comes in to view as the scoop moves to the left. On Mars, InSight will scrape and tamp down soil on top of the mole to help it dig.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

› Larger view

After the mole unexpectedly backed out of the pit while
hammering last year, the team placed the small scoop at the end of the lander’s
robotic arm on top of it to keep it in the ground. Now that the mole is fully
embedded in the soil, they will use the scoop to scrape additional soil on top
of it, tamping down this soil to help provide more friction. Because it will
take months to pack down enough soil, the mole isn’t expected to resume hammering
until early 2021.

“I’m very glad we were able to recover from the
unexpected ‘pop-out’ event we experienced and get the mole deeper than it’s
ever been,” said Troy Hudson, the scientist and engineer at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory who led the work to get the mole digging. “But we’re
not quite done. We want to make sure there’s enough soil on top of the mole to
enable it to dig on its own without any assistance from the arm.”

The mole is formally called the Heat Flow and Physical
Properties Package, or HP3, and was built and provided to NASA by
the German Space Agency (DLR). JPL in Southern California leads the InSight
mission.

More About the
Mission

JPL manages InSight for NASA’s
Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA’s Discovery Program,
managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its
cruise stage and lander, and supports spacecraft operations for the mission.

A number of European partners,
including France’s Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German
Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission. CNES provided the
Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument to NASA, with the principal investigator at
IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris). Significant contributions for
SEIS came from IPGP; the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS)
in Germany; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in
Switzerland; Imperial College London and Oxford University in the United
Kingdom; and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument, with significant
contributions from the Space Research Center (CBK) of the Polish Academy of
Sciences and Astronika in Poland. Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología (CAB)
supplied the temperature and wind sensors.

News Media Contact

Andrew Good

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-2433

andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

Alana Johnson / Grey Hautaluoma

NASA Headquarters, Washington

202-672-4780 / 202-358-0668

alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov / grey.hautaluoma-1@nasa.gov

2020-197

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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