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

[Phil Stooke]

Being that close is not good for probing the core. For the core we need a big impact more than 60% of the way around the planet so waves pass through or around the core on the way to the seismometer.

Phil

[Paolo]

I had completely forgotten that I took a few pictures of an InSight mockup and French seismometer at the Le Bourget Airshow in 2015
https://www.flickr.com/photos/9228922@N03/1...57654838335682/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/9228922@N03/1...57654838335682/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/9228922@N03/1...57654838335682/

[Tom Tamlyn]

An article by Paul Voosen on the Science site, based on an interview with Matt Golombek, contains interesting details of JPL’s initial assessment of Insight’s landing area.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/mar...g-study-planets

[Explorer1]

Good news from To's link regarding the sandy interior of a hollow!
Wondering about this bit though:

The biggest mystery for the lander team right now is figuring out exactly where it is. A Mars orbiter set to image the center of the landing zone on Thursday will miss the lander, because it missed the center slightly. An instrument on InSight called the inertial measurement unit has pinned the location to within a 5-kilometer-wide circle. InSight’s entry, descent, and landing team will refine that estimate down to a kilometer or less.

They can't slew HiRise a little to the side where the IMU says the lander is? (my avatar's existence tells me MRO can do it) Or is the imaging strip just too thin to guarantee catching it on Thursday?

[elakdawalla]

MRO receives command sequences only a few times a month; its command load for the Thursday image is already onboard and can't be changed now.

[kenny]

Thanks for the link, Tom Tamlyn, which includes this assessment :

… its location, which closely resembles martian terrains previously scouted by the Spirit rover. For example, InSight landed in what’s called a hollow, a crater that has been filled in with soil and leveled flat.

My initial (and highly speculative) impression from the first images from each camera is that Insight has luckily landed inside one of those circular sandy areas that we first saw at the Spirit rover landing site in 2004. I think they were perhaps shallow craters in-filled with wind-blown dust and sand. 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.

So wasn't too far adrift.
Just sayin' ...!

[atomoid]

Phoenix had a MARDI, though i recall it was never switched on due to some integration bug uncovered at the 11th hour that could have jeopardized the landing process. [EDIT: found the scoop on that]
I never thought about it until now, but I guess the Insight team decided to not to even include a MARDI for that or perhaps other reasons as well, so no descent images to help define the landing context.

[mcaplinger]

I guess the Insight team decided to not to even include a MARDI for that or perhaps other reasons as well, so no descent images to help define the landing context.

We offered a number of options, but they chose not to use any of them (of course they had a cost.)

In all honesty the landing context argument isn't extremely compelling, assuming we get HiRISE images post-landing.

[mcaplinger]

A Mars orbiter set to image the center of the landing zone on Thursday will miss the lander, because it missed the center slightly.

Missed with HiRISE. If only there was a wider-field "context camera"...

[ChrisC]

From the following three tweets:
https://twitter.com/HiRISE/status/1067874528187973632
https://twitter.com/HiRISE/status/1067874791648940032
https://twitter.com/HiRISE/status/1067875300178980865

MRO’s attempt to image InSight on the parachute during its descent was unsuccessful. The geometry was more challenging than the Phoenix & Curiosity images, and the uncertainty in timing and the limitations on MRO’s ability to rapidly pan the camera across the scene motivated the HiRISE team to use a camera setting which unfortunately saturated the detector. While disappointing, it is great to know that the parachute worked and the landing went as planned. We want to thank all the folks who worked hard on this (special thanks to @MarsMaven ) and we can't wait for some great science from InSight to start coming in!

[nprev]

Kudos to the MRO team for the great try. I doubt that many of us can appreciate the level of effort required to even attempt this sort of feat.

Onward!

[nprev]

From Science:

"Now, a friendly competition is on. Golombek and his peers hope to beat the satellites to fixing InSight’s location. They should have until 6 December, when an orbiter will likely capture it. Right now, they’re stretching out the scant imagery, trying to compare their hollow to existing high-resolution maps. Their job will get much easier next week, when the camera on the robotic arm’s elbow will be extended to photograph the lander’s terrain in detail."

[Ant103]

What happened to the "raw" images page ?

https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/multimedia/raw-images/

There is none.

[serpens]

Er....yes there are.....???

[RoverDriver]

From Science:

"Now, a friendly competition is on. Golombek and his peers hope to beat the satellites to fixing InSight’s location...."

I was thinking that Tim Parker in a couple of days after landing had Curiosity location to within 50cm using FHAZ, then realized InSight is in a parking lot without many features on the horizon. But if he managed to keep track of Opportunity while driving to Endeavour I'm pretty sure he will be able to do it in his sleep. ;-)

Paolo