I noticed the disturbed regolith as well. If all went according to plan, the mole is now at a depth of 70 cm, if I understood the mission log posted by PaulH51 correctly.

EDIT: New blog post up at DLR: The InSight mission logbook

The mole reached a depth of at least 18 cm but less than 50 cm after the full four hours of hammering. It encountered an obstacle which it might have pushed aside after 3,5 hours. The mole is now 15 degrees inclined with the vertical.

EDIT 2: More news at the DRL page: Good luck ‘Mole’ – DLR’s HP3 experiment starts hammering into the Martian soil

Looks like it encountered another stone after the first one. In a couple of days, they will command another four hours of hammering.

HP³ is on the ground!





I wonder what happened with the positioning of the arm though. The grapple is hanging at an odd angle now.

DLR is happy:



Link to DLR tweet.

There was more extension to come after those pictures. The SEIS Twitter account tweeted that they guessed it had expanded a lot more based on the data from the seismometer and they were right: Tweet with GIF of extension.

It looks like the skirt is not extending all the way. I wonder if this was anticipated? The SEIS account on Twitter has an animation of the skirt slowly "relaxing": @InSight_IPGP

Well, according to elakdawalla a few posts back who quoted Bruce Banerdt, they frequently miss the "grab" on earth too. I guess they will have to do some more testing to make the procedure work successfully more often or maybe they will just accept it takes a few tries. We'll see.

We haven't seen new raw images for a few days. I wonder, does the government shutdown have an effect on the release of images? Or on the daily operations of the lander? Some general information about the effects of the shutdown on NASA can be read here: Planetary Society A quote from the article:



InSight celebrated its first Christmas on Mars, so I assume not much was scheduled to happen during this week even without the shutdown.

10 new images from Sol 20 are on the raw images page. SEIS has been grappled:

Heh, pretty nice. The video is well made, poor Theisinger. I think the music could have been a bit more interesting, but all in all, it is a hilarious clip. I wonder if SpaceX is going to respond with a similar video.

A lot of layers to get happy about.

I wonder if the blueish rocks in the foreground and the blueish dunes are made from the same material?

Yay! I wonder if you see evidence of the swirling air from the rocket exhaust in this picture:

MSL Wheel High Res

Apart from the awesomeness of seeing the wheel in this clarity on another planet, there are some interesting patterns between the threads.

First High-Resolution Color Mosaic of Curiosity's Mastcam Images:

High-Resolution Color Mosaic

Is the wheel configuration in this picture nominal?

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/pr...AUT_04096M_.JPG

Any idea where I can find 3D glasses with the correct colours? I have red and blue glasses and blue and yellow/brown, but not red and green.

And I agree with them, a lot of complicated things to do first!

BTW, the black and white panorama is done, I think.

full pano

The MARDI system has a microphone too. It would be a great PR tool to record some Martian sounds with the sound of a moving arm in the back/foreground.

To my knowledge, the next press conference is at 2 PM EDT? Previous press conferences can be found at space-multimedia.

New pictures are coming in now. The arm has moved.