InSight Surface Operations, 26 Nov 2018- 21 Dec 2022 Options

[nprev]

Thank you very much, rhr!

This is terrific outreach, and a unique opportunity for citizen science. Looking forward to the findings of these groups!

[serpens]

Looking at the Insight weather records https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/weather/ the minimum temperature for Sol 172 is surely an error. -133.5° C or -208.3° F in American parlance is a third lower than the norm.

[fredk]

I didn't recognize the sol 126 night sky field, but the new sol 176 field is easy:
https://mars.nasa.gov/insight-raw-images/su...0000_0678M_.PNG
That's Orion's belt and sword near the upper right and Sirius to its lower left.

It's jarring to see the belt stars trailing the "wrong way" due to the different pole (though we've seen this before with MER).

[PhilipTerryGraha...]

Off to the northwest from the landing site there is a hill. [...] It looks as if it has a lower extension to the right which I had not seen before.

I'm thinking it may be part of a crater rim, considering how populated with craters the area around Homestead Hollow seems to be.

[PaulH51]

The grapple on the robotic arm has been released on Sol 182 (June 1)

Are we going to see a lift on the HP3 housing? I can't think of any other reason for releasing the grapple.

No new entries on the mission blog

[monty python]

Interesting! The mission blog says they believe the mole is down 30 cm, with 7 cm still in the support structure if I interpret them correctly.

We don't know how much modeling they have done and a move now seems risky, but beggars can't be choosers.

Maybe they pull the structure up and it frees the mole from the structure it's rubbing against so it can proceed down at an angle.

[tanjent]

Moving the probe site was something that nobody seemed willing to consider. If this is actually going to be tried, it may come at the cost of some damage to the apparatus and other unanticipated complications, so it likely means that the team believes the probability of success in the present location is very low. Trying something innovative and risky is infinitely preferable to letting the present stalemate continue on to the end of the mission.

The lesson of Hayabusa I is that human ingenuity and persistence can make a crucial difference even in unmanned missions. In a nail-biting way it will be fun to see if they can pull it off. Space is difficult.

[PaulH51]

Sol 182 Animated Grapple test: I guess this increases the odds of an imminent attempt at getting the mole deeper into the regolith? Good luck team InSight

[stevesliva]

I wonder if they figure that holding on with the grapple during hammering will help somehow. I'm not yet ready to jump to the conclusion that they're moving hp3.

[PaulH51]

I'm not sure if anyone noticed the heavy pixelation in the grapple animation, some of that was brought about by my processing, but the PNG images are unusually compressed compared with images issued since the mission started.

I checked the file size of an image of the arm / grapple / sky (without terrain) from sol 175 it was 1.13Mb. This latest batch from sol 182 are only ~240Kb.

I know the mission image server was loading slowly on mobile connections, but I hope that they did not fix that by compressing the detail out of the public images, when they only needed to add thumbnails in order to speed server loading times. I hope that future images loaded on the server return to the resolution seen before this batch, it would appear to be an outreach disaster if the public have await several months for the PDS versions to be posted.

[fredk]

It seems very unlikely that compression was for the sake of loading the public page faster. My guess is that sequence of grapple shots was actually captured at higher compression - notice that it's a large sequence. And later frames are back up to the larger filesize.

(I agree that thumbnails would be welcome!)

[mcaplinger]

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7416

the team plans to use InSight's robotic arm to lift the structure out of the way. Depending on what they see, the team might use InSight's robotic arm to help the mole further later this summer.

[Explorer1]

A video with further details has been released as well, showing their test model.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9sJl3lacpQ

So much for the 'it's a boring mission after EDL and instrument deployment' chatter we had earlier (though I'm sure everyone involved would have preferred that!)

[ddeerrff]

"If removed from the soil, the mole can't go back in."

Why is this? I understand that the structure provides initial guidance for the probe and that there is no way to reinsert the probe into the structure, but couldn't the arm be used to provide a bit of guidance to the probe to get it restarted?

[Hungry4info]

Because the mole can only drill forward. If it's laying on the ground on its side, that's game-over. There's no plausible way to right it.