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

[Gerald]

During the previous hammering effort it was unclear whether the mole made any progress. So, a mark together with a well-defined and flat surface of the soil would be helpful to assess progress during the next hammering effort.
There is some diffuse darkish material next to the well-defined dark line. So, I take the optimistic point of view that the dark line is dust, too:

Why else should they have placed the scoop at exactly this position? With days or even weeks of planning for each step, it's rather unlikely that anything is done by accident.

[Phil Stooke]

There is a new paper by Mariah Baker (Smithsonian Inst.) et al. in JGR-Planets about changes at the InSight landing site (following on from an earlier paper by Charalambous et al. in GRL). The changes include dust devil tracks. I don't recall whether illustrations of this had been posted here before so I made a new one based on work in that paper.

The image shows two Context Camera images from sols 228 and 232, plus a representation of the difference between them (VERY contrast-stretched). Looking at the raw images, you see no obvious changes but the difference image reveals two dark streaks on the edge of Homestead Hollow. They are dust devil tracks and they can be correlated with tracks in HiRISE images and with data from the meteorology instrument. Note these were made from the JPL raw images page, not the PDS images which would be better.

Any pair of images a few sols apart with similar lighting can be compared in this way.

Phil

[vjkane]

The results of the 2020 Senior Review and NASA's response have been posted

Response

Report


Some highlights from NASA's response:

InSight Extended Mission
- InSight is approved for a two-year extended mission, running from January 2021 through December 2022.
- The extended mission will focus on producing a long-duration, high quality seismic dataset. Continued operation of the InSight weather station, and accelerated burial of InSight’s seismic tether using the spacecraft’s Instrument Deployment Arm (IDA), will contribute to acquiring this seismic dataset at the highest quality possible.
- The EM will not prioritize continued deployment of the mole. Some work on the mole deployment may continue, but only to the extent that downward progress is demonstrated in the near term and other mission science or engineering goals are not affected.

[Explorer1]

What are the 'mechanical sequences' to dislodge dust from Insight's solar panels mentioned in the response? It wouldn't be using the arm to somehow brush dust off with the scoop, would it? That seems a rather delicate (and power-hungry) procedure!

[stevesliva]

'High' option does mention regolith studies / trenching / burial of the seismometer tether... though it's not clear what the tradeoffs are in the power budget.

Not clear to me whether funding is medium or high.

[Phil Stooke]

The scoop would not scrape the panels to remove dust - it's hard to imagine a more scary concept. Much more likely would be a series of taps on the panels to loosen dust, allowing the wind to move it. I am surprised, given MER experience, that the frequent wind gusts and vortices detected by the lander have not cleaned the panels.

Phil

[Explorer1]

Yeah, tapping the sides and waiting for a good gust seems more logical to me. But the trouble is, where are the gusts?

[rlorenz]

I am surprised, given MER experience, that the frequent wind gusts and vortices detected by the lander have not cleaned the panels.

I am not surprised. In 2016 Dennis Reiss and I noted that the dust devil track formation rate at Elysium is an order of magnitude less than at Gusev and estimated
"a solar panel clearing recurrence interval estimate of ∼11 Mars years "
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016Icar......315R/abstract

It may be that stronger prevailing winds give you more vortices, but suppress the largest, most intense vortices that do the lifting.

[Phil Stooke]

Thanks. It's good to have that perspective. I was reading the papers on changes at the site and assumed more activity than there apparently is.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

We just had another round of hammering. I don't see any sign of movement on the tether.

Phil

[stevesliva]

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-extends-...ience-missions/

Seems to imply that burying the seismometer tether is a priority. So we ought to see a trench or two if that's the case. I wonder what side of the pinning mass makes sense? Only the far side?
No bloglike posts @ the SEIS site: https://www.seis-insight.eu/fr/actualites

[Paolo]

well this is sad but not unexpected
https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1349760462854909957

One phase ends, and another begins…

Last weekend, the mole made a final attempt to dig farther underground on Mars. Even with all the steps we’ve taken to #SaveTheMole, it seems there’s just not enough friction in this soil to keep it moving downward.

[Paolo]

I hope we see a re-fly of a heat flow measurement experiment soon. I like the idea of multiple penetrators dropping from one entry vehicle, using momentum to enter the soil, and enough safety in numbers that one or more failures still lets us get one success.

last time they tried that it didn't work any better than the mole
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/...tion?id=DEEPSP2

[MahFL]

Ah bummer the mole did not work.
Good news though for the extended mission.

[Antdoghalo]

RIP Mole! We cheered for your success through 759 sols but alast, the dirt didn't cooperate!
Don't think we have time to change Rosalind Franklin to include a mole but maybe we can piggyback the experiment onto whatever is going to the 2024 opportunity.