I never was able to get Cargo Cult's walkabout VR version of InSight's landing site working, just brings up a simple image, perhaps i need SteamVR equipment or something like that?

I'm amazed by the size of their mission control for the spacecraft. I don't think Apollo 11 had half as many.

Just a new thought here. Most of us have heard the "sound" of winds moving around insights solar panels audio recorded by the seismometer I think.

Could these vibrations transfer to the ground and hinder the supper sensitive seismometers work?

...Obviously just a press release, so take it with a grain of salt, but a NASA/ESA partnership seems like the best way to split the costs.
...

Regardless of all the data from orbiters there is a degree of luck involved in landing. Curiosity did a hole in one in a small crater. Imagine if she had bounced to a stop in the middle of Endurance crater's central dune field.

I did a little something on the last ICC image. Yet dusty but I hope it'll get better in the next few weeks
In equirectangular projection, I think we can have a clearer view of a part of the landing site.

Moment of well-meaning pedantry here: Weight and mass have been mentioned several times and there's that factor of 2.64 difference between Earth and Mars, as well as the distinction between weight (in, eg, Newtons) and mass (kg). For any given object, its mass, weight on Earth, and weight on Mars are three different numbers. I'm not sure that anyone has made any mistakes in the posts above, but there's a lot of potential confusion here.

Of course.
"... InSight's robotic arm also has a bucket with a capacity of roughly 500 g of soil. However, this bucket is not intended for massive excavation works; its main role is to prepare the ground as well as possible before setting the instruments down. It allows engineers to shift a stone that is in the way, flatten a little mound in an otherwise optimal deployment sector, or simply check the nature of the ground."
https://www.seis-insight.eu/en/public-2/the...ida-robotic-arm

Big error on the graphic in that article, though; the Viking landers were nuclear-powered, not solar.

Does anyone know if they have an official mission clock for InSight? Similar to the one we have for Curiosity link that shows the sol and current solar time.

Just a quick thought about the Insight payload. If the spacecraft did indeed land on a sand sheet or filled crater, it might be a problem for the seismometer. Any thickness of sand would, if I understand seismometers correctly, cause seismic signals to be dissipated before they reach the instrument. Sand, being much less compacted than rock, would not conduct a seismic signal nearly as well. Even soil should conduct better. I would love to be proven wrong. Alternate opinions welcomed.

... First, I'm still scratching my head at the torturously slow (three month) deployment of the two surface experiments...

... The flat sandy terrain visible by the landing leg seems to finish abruptly a few tens of meters off, at rougher boulder terrain, from the higher viewpoint looking out alongside the seismometer cover...

In the early stages of the mission, can InSight's seismometer be used in concert with the hammer that is to drive the thermal mole into the ground, as a sort of sonar device to help locate buried rocks and maybe identify the best path to get the mole all the way to its desired 5 meter depth?
Moved. -Admin.