NASA’s “mole” on Mars has
failed. After nearly two years of attempting to dig the InSight lander’s heat
probe – nicknamed the mole – into the Red Planet’s surface, engineers have
finally given up.
The InSight lander arrived
on Mars in November 2018. Its main purpose is to study the planet’s deep
interior in order to help us understand the history of the solar system’s rocky
worlds. The lander has three main instruments to help it do that: a seismometer
to catch vibrations traveling through the ground a radio to precisely
measure Mars’s rotation and learn more about its metal core and a setup called
the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) to
measure the heat flowing out of the planet’s center.
The mole is a key part of
HP3 and is a sort of self-hammering nail designed to burrow
about 5 metres under the ground, deeper than any human-made device has dug on
any rocky planet, moon or asteroid before. However, once the mole started its
ill-fated burrowing attempts, the soil proved to be unexpectedly clumpy, so it
didn’t provide the instrument with the friction it needed in order to dig.
The scientists and
engineers working on the mission tried everything they could think of to get
the mole into the ground, even pressing down on it with the scoop on InSight’s
robotic arm. Nothing worked, so after a final attempt on 9 January, the team
has now ended its efforts.
“We’ve given it everything
we’ve got, but Mars and our heroic mole remain incompatible,” said Tilman Spohn
at the German Aerospace Center, the leader of the HP3 team,
in press release “Fortunately, we’ve learned a lot that will benefit future
missions that attempt to dig into the subsurface.” Researchers on future
missions will understand the Martian soil better thanks to the many attempts to
bury the mole.
While that particular
instrument didn’t work, InSight’s other tools are performing well The
seismometer has already recorded nearly 500 marsquakes, and NASA has extended
the mission until December 2022.
source: Newscients.com
