NASA does it again by landing safely on Mars—something no one else has done

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Red-shirt clad engineers broke into cheers as InSight touched down.

Enlarge / Staff at the Jet Propulsion Lab celebrate as InSight sends its first picture down from Mars.

Since humans began trying in 1962, only seven lander and rover missions have ever touched down safely on the surface of Mars, phoned home, and prepared to carry out their scientific missions.

 

On Monday, an eighth mission joined their ranks—NASA's InSight lander. During its descent, the spacecraft experienced up to eight Gs of force. Its heat shield burned away in the thin Martian atmosphere before its parachute deployed to slow it further.

 

Throughout the spacecraft's descent, two little CubeSats followed its trajectory from orbit and transmitted data for most of the journey. This is the first time CubeSats have gone interplanetary, and they played a critical role in providing real-time data as InSight slowed 20,000 km/hour from the top of the Martian atmosphere down to the surface.

 

Inside the control room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with space agency administrator Jim Bridenstine looking on, red-shirted engineers broke into cheers as InSight touched down. They clapped their hands, hugged one another, and exuded a mixture of excitement and relief.

 

"It was intense," Bridenstine said, shortly after the landing, on NASA Television. "It's very different being here than watching on TV. What's amazing is that, as soon as it was over, my cell phone rang, and it was the vice president." Mike Pence had watched and wanted to send along his congratulations.

 

Within moments after touching down, InSight took a picture of the red planet's surface, with its hazy atmosphere in the background. As the camera's dust cover had not yet been removed, dust particles covered the image. But no matter: InSight had reached the surface of Mars and reported that all was well.

 

The Soviet Union and Russia have tried multiple times to reach the surface of Mars, and the European Space Agency has tried once, all to no avail. While NASA has had a handful of failures as well, it can now boast success with InSight as well as the Viking 1 & 2 landers, Mars Pathfinder; Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit & Opportunity, the Phoenix lander, and Curiosity rover.

Source

[Matrix]

NASA's InSight lander successfully lands on Mars, prepares to investigate the planet's interior

 

 

 

What just happened? If you're a fan of all things Mars and space-related, we've got some good news for you. Today, NASA's InSight lander finally made its way through deep space, successfully touching down on the Red Planet's surface with no significant complications to speak of.

As reported by Wired, confirmation of the lander's touchdown was relayed to NASA engineers courtesy of two "briefcase-sized" satellites, dubbed Mars Cube One-A and Mars Cube One-B.

As you can probably imagine, everyone in NASA's Mission Control room was pretty happy to hear that the lander had touched down safely. You can watch their reactions for yourself in the following 360 video, which was livestreamed on one of the organization's official YouTube channels.

InSight's first job is to deploy solar panels, which will be used to keep the machine running while it treks around Mars. While it'll be some time before that happens, space enthusiasts have something to analyze in the interim: InSight's first photograph of Mars, which can be seen below.

The picture is far from clear, due in no small part to the thick layer of dust and dirt coating InSight's camera lens. However, we can likely expect to see better-quality images of the Red Planet in the future, as InSight's mission progresses.

If you haven't been keeping up with NASA's InSight project so far, the lander was first launched on May 5, with the goal of giving us our first real look at Mars' interior.

As Wired points out, InSight will spend its days performing a "sweeping geophysical investigation" that could answer some of science's longest-standing questions about the planet - specifically, questions about its "formation, evolution, and composition."

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[steven36]

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MarCO’s camera systems, two per spacecraft, run a customized embedded Linux distribution on a GumStix single-board computer. A Python script spawns at boot time on each system, and effectively serves as the interface to the spacecraft. The script receives commands from and sends data to the FCPU via the RTC microcontroller, which acts as an I2C-UART bridge. A simple communications packet protocol defines the way the camera and FCPU interact, and includes basic data integrity checking through the use of CRC16-CCITT. The camera systems are powered on for short periods of time directly by FCPU GPIO lines to perform brief imaging campaigns, process the images, and store them on standard SD cards. Images can be retrieved any time the systems are powered.

 

Source:

https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/pdf/10.2514/6.2016-2491

 

 Linux was used on Mars  to take the pictures  👽