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

[atomoid]

Since the arm is only able to 'hold position' and not 'push', I had assumed the mole would be 'pinned' to the side of the hole then the arm locked with little if any tension when the hammering commences, in which case i would suspect that little torque to be released early in the hammering process as the sands reorganize to accommodate the mole's new vector, however, unless they are indeed able to set up a high-torque configuration with the arm, it seems they may instead be setting up the timing of the arm movement to coincide along with the hammering and as a result the arm is going to keep tension throughout the pinning operation, enough tension that they are concerned about the magnitude of such forces:

The number of commanded hammer strokes has been limited to 20. The concern is that the pinned Mole could proceed quite rapidly and make the five centimetres it is sticking out of the ground in only a few hammer strokes. That might cause the scoop to hit and damage the measuring tether coming out of the top of the Mole. We here at DLR have used performance data for the Mole from laboratory measurements to determine that, in the best (or worst) case, it would take the Mole eight strokes to make four centimetres. As this was thought to be overly conservative, and it was feared that the Mole might not make any noticeable progress, the team settled on 20 strokes.

[fredk]

Some movement on 308 - our first direct look at hammering on Mars:

This spans about 5 minutes.

[stevesliva]

Down a little and precessed a little?

[James Sorenson]

How about move the scoop away from it and just see what it does? That is one step that appears to have been skipped after they moved the support structure.

[PaulH51]

Here's a stabilised GIF from @AstroMelina

[paraisosdelsiste...]

Seems like there are some hopefully good advances in the HP3 hammering. This animation shows the movement of the mole as of yesterday, 12th of October, during six minutes.

[JRehling]

Fun video. ~3 cm down, 3 m to go?

[Decepticon]

Wonderful new!

Great animation!

[testguru]

Sorry if I am posting this in the wrong spot, but I have a question about the Seismometer.

MRO images have shown a lot of fairly large craters appearing over the years and I was wondering if the Insight seismometer has picked up any meteorite impact signals yet? My understanding is that the largest signal measured so far is around a magnitude of 3.5. I am surprised that about a year has gone by without any significant meteor impact signals. I thought the seismometer was so sensitive that it would detect at least a few meteor impacts by now?

[stevesliva]

Confirming what you haven't found, both the JPL and InSight teams' recent releases seem to avoid speculating on the causes of the mag3+ quakes. I'm going to speculate that they're saving their conclusions of that nature for future releases that coincide with future publications. They have been good with keeping the public apprised so far.

That said, awesome progress with the Mole!

[Explorer1]

Yes, great to see movement in the right direction.
What will happened when the mole gets too low in the ground for the scoop to press against it anymore? Hopefully that will be enough for it to get traction and finish digging on its own?

[MahFL]

Yes, great to see movement in the right direction.
What will happened when the mole gets too low in the ground for the scoop to press against it anymore? Hopefully that will be enough for it to get traction and finish digging on its own?

That is the proverbial 64 million dollar question. My guess is the mole will be fine and dig deep .

[atomoid]

Its good to have confirmation that the mole hadn't pinned itself into a crevice in a buried rock, so onward! (er, downward!)
Here is a full resolution crop GIF (5fps) of ten frames sol311

Interesting to see the mole twisting on its way down, im sure thats conforming to test results and presumably may alternate and cancel out as the tether trails along behind the descending mole, and as the borehole fills with soil behind it the tether will thread through along a perhaps careening path much like a hot knife through butter without imparting too much drag, i'd assume that infalling regolith should tend to work to prevent further drag-inducing twists once it gets a dozen or more cm below the surface.. thats novice white-knuckle speculation of course!

[Keatah]

I believe that the twisting/rotating motion of the mole is because it is in contact with the scoop at an angle. If the angle of contact was square the motion would be zero. The rotation of the mole would also be zero if it weren't in contact with scoop - so this is likely a temporary situation.

[fredk]

Something setting in the west or SW on sol 314 as viewed from the ICC:

Phobos would set in the east, so it's probably Deimos but might be a very bright star or planet - I haven't checked what was in the sky then.
Edit: looking back at the 254 and 258 ICC night sequences shows Deimos again setting which I missed at the time.