Posted on 11/25/2018 5:44:07 PM PST by BenLurkin
NASA's InSight Mars lander is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet tomorrow afternoon (Nov. 26), and mission team members and agency officials are understandably nervous about the make-or-break moment.
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The difficulty for landed missions stems chiefly from the fact that Mars features both a relatively strong gravitational pull and a wispy atmosphere, which is just 1 percent as thick as that of Earth, said Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager at JPL. So, approaching spacecraft get accelerated to high speeds and then have a hard time dissipating enough energy to slow down before landing, he explained during today's news conference.
InSight will hit the Martian atmosphere a little before 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT) while traveling about 12,300 mph (19,800 km/h). The spacecraft must nail its target entry angle of 12 degrees precisely, team members have said: Any steeper, and InSight will burn up; any shallower, and the vehicle will bounce off the atmosphere and careen into space.
Atmospheric drag will eventually slow InSight down to about 840 mph (1,350 km/h), and then the craft will deploy its supersonic parachute, Hoffman said. Shortly before touchdown, InSight will fire up its retrorockets, allowing it to settle onto the red dirt at just 5 mph (8 km/h)
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
I bet there’s a lot of coffee being consumed at Mission Control.
It takes 25 min for a command signal to reach Mars. Makes a correct shot that much harder.
Because: "The instrument redesign and two-year delay add $153.8 million" to the $675 million mission cost, NASA said in a statement. "The additional cost will not delay or cancel any current missions, though there may be fewer opportunities for new missions in future years, from fiscal years 2017-2020," it added."
All this to drill a hole 16 feet deep.
Put another way, $4.3 million per inch.
Of course if they crater the probe, all bets are off. No way to get any data out of that hole...
Ya, not a supporter of the 'new' NASA'. Not even a little.
*ping*
LOL!
is Viagra a NASA sponsor now?
Such a waste.
Yes yes but its going to sit one that hole for 24 months - see ...
According to the article, it is currently around 7 minutes.
Thanks for the correction. I should have double checked.
You are welcome. Touchdown is suppose to be 2:54 EST and NASA should receive a beep from the lander at 3:01 EST.
Disagree 100%. Extremely difficult, cutting edge scientific research or exploration is one of the few things that government should do for the nation.
The more difficult to accomplish, the larger the potential benefit the nation receives.
The NASA web page got the above report wrong. Touchdown was confirmed at 2:54 EST which means it actually landed at 2:47 EST..
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