posted 10-16-2020 04:25 PM               

NASA InSight's 'Mole' Is Out of Sight

Now that the heat probe is just below the Martian surface, InSight's arm will scoop some additional soil on top to help it keep digging so it can take Mars' temperature.

NASA's InSight lander continues working to get its "mole" — a 16-inch-long (40-centimeter-long) pile driver and heat probe - deep below the surface of Mars. A camera on InSight's arm recently took images of the now partially filled-in "mole hole," showing only the device's science tether protruding from the ground.

Sensors embedded in the tether are designed to measure heat flowing from the planet once the mole has dug at least 10 feet (3 meters) deep. The mission team has been working to help the mole burrow to at least that depth so that it can take Mars' temperature.

The mole was designed so that loose soil would flow around it, providing friction against its outer hull so that it can dig deeper; without this friction, the mole just bounces in place as it hammers into the ground. But the soil where InSight landed is different than what previous missions have encountered: During hammering, the soil sticks together, forming a small pit around the device instead of collapsing around it and providing the necessary friction.

After the mole unexpectedly backed out of the pit while hammering last year, the team placed the small scoop at the end of the lander's robotic arm on top of it to keep it in the ground. Now that the mole is fully embedded in the soil, they will use the scoop to scrape additional soil on top of it, tamping down this soil to help provide more friction. Because it will take months to pack down enough soil, the mole isn't expected to resume hammering until early 2021.

"I'm very glad we were able to recover from the unexpected 'pop-out' event we experienced and get the mole deeper than it's ever been," said Troy Hudson, the scientist and engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who led the work to get the mole digging. "But we're not quite done. We want to make sure there's enough soil on top of the mole to enable it to dig on its own without any assistance from the arm."

The mole is formally called the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, or HP3, and was built and provided to NASA by the German Space Agency (DLR). JPL in Southern California leads the InSight mission. Read more about the mole's recent progress at this DLR blog.

posted 01-14-2021 11:26 AM               

NASA InSight's 'Mole' Ends Its Journey on Mars

The heat probe deployed on Mars by NASA's InSight lander has ended its portion of the mission. Since Feb. 28, 2019, the probe, called the "mole," has been attempting to burrow into the Martian surface to take the planet's internal temperature, providing details about the interior heat engine that drives the Mars' evolution and geology. But the soil's unexpected tendency to clump deprived the spike-like mole of the friction it needs to hammer itself to a sufficient depth.

Above: The "mole," a heat probe that traveled to Mars aboard NASA's InSight lander, as it looked after hammering on Jan. 9, 2021, the 754th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. After trying since Feb. 28, 2019, to bury the probe, the mission team called an end to their efforts.

After getting the top of the mole about 2 or 3 centimeters under the surface, the team tried one last time to use a scoop on InSight's robotic arm to scrape soil onto the probe and tamp it down to provide added friction. After the probe conducted 500 additional hammer strokes on Saturday, Jan. 9, with no progress, the team called an end to their efforts.

Part of an instrument called the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3), the mole is a 16-inch-long (40-centimeter-long) pile driver connected to the lander by a tether with embedded temperature sensors. These sensors are designed to measure heat flowing from the planet once the mole has dug at least 10 feet (3 meters) deep.

"We've given it everything we've got, but Mars and our heroic mole remain incompatible," said HP3's principal investigator, Tilman Spohn of DLR. "Fortunately, we've learned a lot that will benefit future missions that attempt to dig into the subsurface."

While NASA's Phoenix lander scraped the top layer of the Martian surface, no mission before InSight has tried to burrow into the soil. Doing so is important for a variety of reasons: Future astronauts may need to dig through soil to access water ice, while scientists want to study the subsurface's potential to support microbial life.

"We are so proud of our team who worked hard to get InSight's mole deeper into the planet. It was amazing to see them troubleshoot from millions of miles away," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "This is why we take risks at NASA – we have to push the limits of technology to learn what works and what doesn't. In that sense, we've been successful: We've learned a lot that will benefit future missions to Mars and elsewhere, and we thank our German partners from DLR for providing this instrument and for their collaboration."

Hard-Earned Wisdom

The unexpected properties of the soil near the surface next to InSight will be puzzled over by scientists for years to come. The mole's design was based on soil seen by previous Mars missions – soil that proved very different from what the mole encountered. For two years, the team worked to adapt the unique and innovative instrument to these new circumstances.

"The mole is a device with no heritage. What we attempted to do – to dig so deep with a device so small – is unprecedented," said Troy Hudson, a scientist and engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California who has led efforts to get the mole deeper into the Martian crust. "Having had the opportunity to take this all the way to the end is the greatest reward."

Besides learning about the soil at this location, engineers have gained invaluable experience operating the robotic arm. In fact, they used the arm and scoop in ways they never intended to at the outset of the mission, including pressing against and down on the mole. Planning the moves and getting them just right with the commands they were sending up to InSight pushed the team to grow.

They'll put their hard-earned wisdom to use in the future. The mission intends to employ the robotic arm in burying the tether that conveys data and power between the lander and InSight's seismometer, which has recorded more than 480 marsquakes. Burying it will help reduce temperature changes that have created cracking and popping sounds in seismic data.

There's much more science to come from InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport. NASA recently extended the mission for two more years, to Dec. 2022. Along with hunting for quakes, the lander hosts a radio experiment that is collecting data to reveal whether the planet's core is liquid or solid. And InSight's weather sensors are capable of providing some of the most detailed meteorological data ever collected on Mars. Together with weather instruments aboard NASA's Curiosity rover and its new Perseverance rover, which lands on Feb. 18, the three spacecraft will create the first meteorological network on another planet.

posted 07-22-2021 07:14 PM               

NASA's InSight Reveals the Deep Interior of Mars

Before NASA's InSight spacecraft touched down on Mars in 2018, the rovers and orbiters studying the Red Planet concentrated on its surface. The stationary lander's seismometer has changed that, revealing details about the planet's deep interior for the first time.

Three papers based on the seismometer's data were published today in Science, providing details on the depth and composition of Mars' crust, mantle, and core, including confirmation that the planet's center is molten. Earth's outer core is molten, while its inner core is solid; scientists will continue to use InSight's data to determine whether the same holds true for Mars.

"When we first started putting together the concept of the mission more than a decade ago, the information in these papers is what we hoped to get at the end," said InSight's principal investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which leads the mission. "This represents the culmination of all the work and worry over the past decade."

InSight's seismometer, called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), has recorded 733 distinct marsquakes. About 35 of those – all between magnitudes 3.0 and 4.0 – provided the data for the three papers. The ultrasensitive seismometer enables scientists to "hear" seismic events from hundreds to thousands of miles away.

Peering Into Mars

Seismic waves vary in speed and shape when traveling through different materials inside a planet. Those variations on Mars have given seismologists a way to study the planet's inner structure. In turn, what the scientists learn about Mars can help improve the understanding of how all rocky planets – including Earth – formed.

Like Earth, Mars heated up as it formed from the dust and larger clumps of meteoritic material orbiting the Sun that helped to shape our early solar system. Over the first tens of millions of years, the planet separated into three distinct layers – the crust, mantle, and core – in a process called differentiation. Part of InSight's mission was to measure the depth, size, and structure of these three layers.

Each of the papers in Science focuses on a different layer. The scientists found the crust was thinner than expected and may have two or even three sub-layers. It goes as deep as 12 miles (20 kilometers) if there are two sub-layers, or 23 miles (37 kilometers) if there are three.

Beneath that is the mantle, which extends 969 miles (1,560 kilometers) below the surface.

At the heart of Mars is the core, which has a radius of 1,137 miles (1,830 kilometers). Confirming the size of the molten core was especially exciting for the team. "This study is a once-in-a-lifetime chance," said Simon Stähler of the Swiss research university ETH Zurich, lead author of the core paper. "It took scientists hundreds of years to measure Earth's core; after the Apollo missions, it took them 40 years to measure the Moon's core. InSight took just two years to measure Mars' core."

Hunting for Wiggles

The earthquakes most people feel come from faults caused by tectonic plates shifting. Unlike Earth, Mars has no tectonic plates; its crust is instead like one giant plate. But faults, or rock fractures, still form in the Martian crust due to stresses caused by the slight shrinking of the planet as it continues to cool.

InSight scientists spend much of their time searching for bursts of vibration in seismograms, where the tiniest wiggle on a line can represent a quake or, for that matter, noise created by wind. If seismogram wiggles follow certain known patterns (and if the wind is not gusting at the same time), there's a chance they could be a quake.

The initial wiggles are primary, or P, waves, which are followed by secondary, or S, waves. These waves can also show up again later in the seismogram after reflecting off layers inside the planet.

"What we're looking for is an echo," said Amir Khan of ETH Zurich, lead author of the paper on the mantle. "We're detecting a direct sound – the quake – and then listening for an echo off a reflector deep underground."

These echoes can even help scientists find changes within a single layer, like the sub-layers within the crust.

"Layering within the crust is something we see all the time on Earth," said Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun of the University of Cologne, lead author on the paper about the crust. "A seismogram's wiggles can reveal properties like a change in porosity or a more fractured layer."

One surprise is that all of InSight's most significant quakes appear to have come from one area, Cerberus Fossae, a region volcanically active enough that lava may have flowed there within the last few million years. Orbiting spacecraft have spotted the tracks of boulders that may have rolled down steep slopes after being shaken loose by marsquakes.

Curiously, no quakes have been detected from more prominent volcanic regions, like Tharsis, home to three of the biggest volcanoes on Mars. But it's possible many quakes – including larger ones – are occurring that InSight can't detect. That's because of shadow zones caused by the core refracting seismic waves away from certain areas, preventing a quake's echo from reaching InSight.

Waiting for the Big One

These results are only the beginning. Scientists now have hard data to refine their models of Mars and its formation, and SEIS detects new marsquakes every day. While InSight's energy level is being managed, its seismometer is still listening and scientists are hopeful they'll detect a quake bigger than 4.0.

"We'd still love to see the big one," said JPL's Mark Panning, co-lead author of the paper on the crust. "We have to do lots of careful processing to pull the things we want from this data. Having a bigger event would make all of this easier."

posted 05-18-2022 09:16 AM               

NASA's InSight Still Hunting Marsquakes as Power Levels Diminish

Dusty solar panels and darker skies are expected to bring the Mars lander mission to a close around the end of this year.

NASA's InSight Mars lander is gradually losing power and is anticipated to end science operations later this summer. By December, InSight's team expects the lander to have become inoperative, concluding a mission that has thus far detected more than 1,300 marsquakes – most recently, a magnitude 5 that occurred on May 4 – and located quake-prone regions of the Red Planet.

Above: InSight captured this image of one of its dust-covered solar panels on April 24, 2022, the 1,211th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The information gathered from those quakes has allowed scientists to measure the depth and composition of Mars' crust, mantle, and core. Additionally, InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) has recorded invaluable weather data and studied remnants of Mars' ancient magnetic field.

"InSight has transformed our understanding of the interiors of rocky planets and set the stage for future missions," said Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division. "We can apply what we've learned about Mars' inner structure to Earth, the Moon, Venus, and even rocky planets in other solar systems."

InSight landed on Mars Nov. 26, 2018. Equipped with a pair of solar panels that each measures about 7 feet (2.2 meters) wide, it was designed to accomplish the mission's primary science goals in its first Mars year (nearly two Earth years). Having achieved them, the spacecraft is now into an extended mission, and its solar panels have been producing less power as they continue to accumulate dust.

Because of the reduced power, the team will soon put the lander's robotic arm in its resting position (called the "retirement pose") for the last time later this month. Originally intended to deploy the seismometer and the lander's heat probe, the arm has played an unexpected role in the mission: Along with using it to help bury the heat probe after sticky Martian soil presented the probe with challenges, the team used the arm in an innovative way to remove dust from the solar panels. As a result, the seismometer was able to operate more often than it would have otherwise, leading to new discoveries.

When InSight landed, the solar panels produced around 5,000 watt-hours each Martian day, or sol – enough to power an electric oven for an hour and 40 minutes. Now, they're producing roughly 500 watt-hours per sol – enough to power the same electric oven for just 10 minutes.

Additionally, seasonal changes are beginning in Elysium Planitia, InSight's location on Mars. Over the next few months, there will be more dust in the air, reducing sunlight – and the lander's energy. While past efforts removed some dust, the mission would need a more powerful dust-cleaning event, such as a "dust devil" (a passing whirlwind), to reverse the current trend.

"We've been hoping for a dust cleaning like we saw happen several times to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers," said Bruce Banerdt, InSight's principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which leads the mission. "That's still possible, but energy is low enough that our focus is making the most of the science we can still collect."

If just 25% of InSight's panels were swept clean by the wind, the lander would gain about 1,000 watt-hours per sol – enough to continue collecting science. However, at the current rate power is declining, InSight's non-seismic instruments will rarely be turned on after the end of May.

Energy is being prioritized for the lander's seismometer, which will operate at select times of day, such as at night, when winds are low and marsquakes are easier for the seismometer to "hear." The seismometer itself is expected to be off by the end of summer, concluding the science phase of the mission.

At that point, the lander will still have enough power to operate, taking the occasional picture and communicating with Earth. But the team expects that around December, power will be low enough that one day InSight will simply stop responding.

posted 09-19-2022 11:37 AM               

NASA's InSight 'Hears' Its First Meteoroid Impacts on Mars

NASA's InSight lander has detected seismic waves from four space rocks that crashed on Mars in 2020 and 2021. Not only do these represent the first impacts detected by the spacecraft's seismometer since InSight touched down on the Red Planet in 2018, it also marks the first time seismic and acoustic waves from an impact have been detected on Mars.

A new paper published Monday (Sept. 19) in Nature Geoscience details the impacts, which ranged between 53 and 180 miles (85 and 290 kilometers) from InSight's location, a region of Mars called Elysium Planitia.

The first of the four confirmed meteoroids – the term used for space rocks before they hit the ground – made the most dramatic entrance: It entered Mars' atmosphere on Sept. 5, 2021, exploding into at least three shards that each left a crater behind.

Then, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flew over the estimated impact site to confirm the location. The orbiter used its black-and-white Context Camera to reveal three darkened spots on the surface. After locating these spots, the orbiter's team used the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, or HiRISE, to get a color close-up of the craters (the meteoroid could have left additional craters in the surface, but they would be too small to see in HiRISE's images).

"After three years of InSight waiting to detect an impact, those craters looked beautiful," said Ingrid Daubar of Brown University, a co-author of the paper and a specialist in Mars impacts.

After combing through earlier data, scientists confirmed three other impacts had occurred on May 27, 2020; Feb. 18, 2021; and Aug. 31, 2021.

Researchers have puzzled over why they haven't detected more meteoroid impacts on Mars. The Red Planet is next to the solar system's main asteroid belt, which provides an ample supply of space rocks to scar the planet's surface. Because Mars' atmosphere is just 1% as thick as Earth's, more meteoroids pass through it without disintegrating.

InSight's seismometer has detected over 1,300 marsquakes. Provided by France's space agency, the Centre National d'Études Spatiales, the instrument is so sensitive that it can detect seismic waves from thousands of miles away. But the Sept. 5, 2021, event marks the first time an impact was confirmed as the cause of such waves.

InSight's team suspects that other impacts may have been obscured by noise from wind or by seasonal changes in the atmosphere. But now that the distinctive seismic signature of an impact on Mars has been discovered, scientists expect to find more hiding within InSight's nearly four years of data.

Science Behind the Strikes

Seismic data offer various clues that will help researchers better understand the Red Planet. Most marsquakes are caused by subsurface rocks cracking from heat and pressure. Studying how the resulting seismic waves change as they move through different material provides scientists a way to study Mars' crust, mantle, and core.

The four meteoroid impacts confirmed so far produced small quakes with a magnitude of no more than 2.0. Those smaller quakes provide scientists with only a glimpse into the Martian crust, while seismic signals from larger quakes, like the magnitude 5 event that occurred in May 2022, can also reveal details about the planet's mantle and core.

But the impacts will be critical to refining Mars' timeline. "Impacts are the clocks of the solar system," said the paper's lead author, Raphael Garcia of Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace in Toulouse, France. "We need to know the impact rate today to estimate the age of different surfaces."

Scientists can approximate the age of a planet's surface by counting its impact craters: The more they see, the older the surface. By calibrating their statistical models based on how often they see impacts occurring now, scientists can then estimate how many more impacts happened earlier in the solar system's history.

InSight's data, in combination with orbital images, can be used to rebuild a meteoroid's trajectory and the size of its shock wave. Every meteoroid creates a shock wave as it hits the atmosphere and an explosion as it hits the ground. These events send sound waves through the atmosphere. The bigger the explosion, the more this sound wave tilts the ground when it reaches InSight. The lander's seismometer is sensitive enough to measure how much the ground tilts from such an event and in what direction.

"We're learning more about the impact process itself," Garcia said. "We can match different sizes of craters to specific seismic and acoustic waves now."

The lander still has time to study Mars. Dust buildup on the lander's solar panels is reducing its power and will eventually lead to the spacecraft shutting down. Predicting precisely when is difficult, but based on the latest power readings, engineers now believe the lander could shut down between October of this year and January 2023.

posted 10-11-2022 09:51 AM               

NASA's InSight Waits Out Dust Storm

NASA's InSight mission, which is expected to end in the near future, saw a recent drop in power generated by its solar panels as a continent-size dust storm swirls over Mars' southern hemisphere. First observed on Sept. 21, 2022, by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the storm is roughly 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers) from InSight and initially had little impact on the lander.

Above: NASA's InSight Mars lander took this final selfie on April 24, 2022, the 1,211th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The lander's solar panels have become covered with dust since the lander touched down on Mars in November 2018, which has led to a gradual decline in its power level. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The mission carefully monitors the lander's power level, which has been steadily declining as dust accumulates on its solar arrays. By Monday, Oct. 3, the storm had grown large enough and was lofting so much dust that the thickness of the dusty haze in the Martian atmosphere had increased by nearly 40% around InSight. With less sunlight reaching the lander's panels, its energy fell from 425 watt-hours per Martian day, or sol, to just 275 watt-hours per sol.

InSight's seismometer has been operating for about 24 hours every other Martian day. But the drop in solar power does not leave enough energy to completely charge the batteries every sol. At the current rate of discharge, the lander would be able to operate only for several weeks. So to conserve energy, the mission will turn off InSight's seismometer for the next two weeks.

"We were at about the bottom rung of our ladder when it comes to power. Now we're on the ground floor," said InSight's project manager, Chuck Scott of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "If we can ride this out, we can keep operating into winter – but I'd worry about the next storm that comes along."

The team had estimated that InSight's mission would end sometime between late October of this year and January 2023, based on predictions of how much the dust on its solar panels will reduce its power generation. The lander has long-since surpassed its primary mission and is now close to the end of its extended mission, conducting "bonus science" by measuring marsquakes, which reveal details about the deep interior of the Red Planet.

Above: The beige clouds seen in this global map of Mars are a continent-size dust storm captured on Sept. 29, 2022, by the Mars Climate Imager camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. NASA's Perseverance, Curiosity, and InSight missions are labeled, showing the vast distances between them. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

Studying Martian Storms

There are signs that this large, regional storm has peaked and entered its decay phase: MRO's Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which measures the heating caused by dust absorbing sunlight, sees the storm's growth slowing down. And the dust-raising clouds observed in pictures from the orbiter's Mars Color Imager camera, which creates daily global maps of the Red Planet and was the first instrument to spot the storm, are not expanding as rapidly as before.

This regional storm isn't a surprise: It's the third storm of its kind that's been seen this year. In fact, Mars dust storms occur at all times of the Martian year, although more of them – and bigger ones – occur during northern fall and winter, which is coming to an end.

Mars dust storms aren't as violent or dramatic as Hollywood portrays them. While winds can blow up to 60 miles per hour (97 kilometers per hour), the Martian air is thin enough that it has just a fraction of the strength of storms on Earth. Mostly, the storms are messy: They toss billowing dust high into the atmosphere, which slowly drops back down, sometimes taking weeks.

On rare occasions, scientists have seen dust storms grow into planet-encircling dust events, which cover almost all of Mars. One of these planet-size dust storms brought NASA's solar-powered Opportunity rover to an end in 2018.

Because they're nuclear-powered, NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have nothing to worry about in terms a dust storm affecting their energy. But the solar-powered Ingenuity helicopter has noticed the overall increase in background haze.

Besides monitoring storms for the safety of NASA missions on the Martian surface, MRO has spent 17 years collecting invaluable data about how and why these storms form. "We're trying to capture the patterns of these storms so we can better predict when they're about to happen," Zurek said. "We learn more about Mars' atmosphere with each one we observe."

posted 10-27-2022 03:57 PM               

NASA's InSight Lander Detects Stunning Meteoroid Impact on Mars

NASA's InSight lander recorded a magnitude 4 marsquake last Dec. 24, but scientists learned only later the cause of that quake: a meteoroid strike estimated to be one of the biggest seen on Mars since NASA began exploring the cosmos. What's more, the meteoroid excavated boulder-size chunks of ice buried closer to the Martian equator than ever found before – a discovery with implications for NASA's future plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet.

Above: Boulder-size blocks of water ice can be seen around the rim of an impact crater on Mars, as viewed by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE camera) aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The crater was formed Dec. 24, 2021, by a meteoroid strike in the Amazonis Planitia region. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

Scientists determined the quake resulted from a meteoroid impact when they looked at before-and-after images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and spotted a new, yawning crater. Offering a rare opportunity to see how a large impact shook the ground on Mars, the event and its effects are detailed in two papers published Thursday, Oct. 27, in the journal Science.

Above: The impact crater, formed Dec. 24, 2021, by a meteoroid strike in the Amazonis Planitia region of Mars, is about 490 feet (150 meters) across, as seen in this annotated image taken by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE camera) aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

The meteoroid is estimated to have spanned 16 to 39 feet (5 to 12 meters) – small enough that it would have burned up in Earth's atmosphere, but not in Mars' thin atmosphere, which is just 1% as dense as our planet's. The impact, in a region called Amazonis Planitia, blasted a crater roughly 492 feet (150 meters) across and 70 feet (21 meters) deep. Some of the ejecta thrown by the impact flew as far as 23 miles (37 kilometers) away.

With images and seismic data documenting the event, this is believed to be one of the largest craters ever witnessed forming any place in the solar system. Many larger craters exist on the Red Planet, but they are significantly older and predate any Mars mission.

"It's unprecedented to find a fresh impact of this size," said Ingrid Daubar of Brown University, who leads InSight's Impact Science Working Group. "It's an exciting moment in geologic history, and we got to witness it."

InSight has seen its power drastically decline in recent months due to dust settling on its solar panels. The spacecraft now is expected to shut down within the next six weeks, bringing the mission's science to an end.

Above: This meteoroid impact crater on Mars was discovered using the black-and-white Context Camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The Context Camera took these before-and-after images of the impact, which occurred on Dec. 24, 2021, in a region of Mars called Amazonis Planitia. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

InSight is studying the planet's crust, mantle, and core. Seismic waves are key to the mission and have revealed the size, depth, and composition of Mars' inner layers. Since landing in November 2018, InSight has detected 1,318 marsquakes, including several caused by smaller meteoroid impacts.

But the quake resulting from last December's impact was the first observed to have surface waves – a kind of seismic wave that ripples along the top of a planet's crust. The second of the two Science papers related to the big impact describes how scientists use these waves to study the structure of Mars' crust.

Crater Hunters

In late 2021, InSight scientists reported to the rest of the team they had detected a major marsquake on Dec. 24. The crater was first spotted on Feb. 11, 2022, by scientists working at Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS), which built and operates two cameras aboard MRO. The Context Camera (CTX) provides black-and-white, medium-resolution images, while the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) produces daily maps of the entire planet, allowing scientists to track large-scale weather changes like the recent regional dust storm that further diminished InSight's solar power.

The impact's blast zone was visible in MARCI data that allowed the team to pin down a 24-hour period within which the impact occurred. These observations correlated with the seismic epicenter, conclusively demonstrating that a meteoroid impact caused the large Dec. 24 marsquake.

"The image of the impact was unlike any I had seen before, with the massive crater, the exposed ice, and the dramatic blast zone preserved in the Martian dust," said Liliya Posiolova, who leads the Orbital Science and Operations Group at MSSS. "I couldn't help but imagine what it must have been like to witness the impact, the atmospheric blast, and debris ejected miles downrange."

Establishing the rate at which craters appear on Mars is critical for refining the planet's geologic timeline. On older surfaces, such as those of Mars and our Moon, there are more craters than on Earth; on our planet, the processes of erosion and plate tectonics erase older features from the surface.

New craters also expose materials below the surface. In this case, large chunks of ice scattered by the impact were viewed by MRO's High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) color camera.

Subsurface ice will be a vital resource for astronauts, who could use it for a variety of needs, including drinking water, agriculture, and rocket propellant. Buried ice has never been spotted this close to the Martian equator, which, as the warmest part of Mars, is an appealing location for astronauts.

posted 12-19-2022 09:24 PM               

NASA InSight – Dec. 19, 2022

On Dec. 18, 2022, NASA's InSight did not respond to communications from Earth. The lander's power has been declining for months, as expected, and it's assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations. It's unknown what prompted the change in its energy; the last time the mission contacted the spacecraft was on Dec. 15, 2022.

The mission will continue to try and contact InSight.

posted 12-21-2022 10:20 AM               

NASA declares InSight probe dead after 4 years studying marsquakes

A robotic probe sent to study the interior of Mars has met its end after more than four years collecting data on the surface of the Red Planet.

NASA declared its InSight mission over on Wednesday (Dec. 21), six days after the lander ceased responding to communications from Earth. Mission controllers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California were unable to contact the three-legged probe after two consecutive attempts, leading them to conclude that its solar-powered batteries had run out of energy — a state engineers refer to as a "dead bus."