Total Pageviews

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

SPACE CADETS / OUT OF WORLD EXPERIENCE ONLY MOMENTS OLD


The first released photo taken by NASA’s Insight lander after the removal of its lens cover. Photo: NASA
NASA wrote:
"NASA’s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) probe successfully completed its soft landing on Mars on Monday after a six-month, 300 million mile journey. And it’s already sending back photos of the desolate Red Planet from its landing site on the Elysium Planitia, courtesy of a post on the lander’s official Twitter feed reading, “There’s a quiet beauty here. Looking forward to exploring my new home.”

“We hit the Martian atmosphere at 12,300 mph (19,800 kilometers per hour), and the whole sequence to touching down on the surface took only six-and-a-half minutes,” said InSight project manager Tom Hoffman at JPL. “During that short span of time, InSight had to autonomously perform dozens of operations and do them flawlessly — and by all indications that is exactly what our spacecraft did.”

“Landing was thrilling, but I’m looking forward to the drilling,” said InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt of [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. “When the first images come down, our engineering and science teams will hit the ground running, beginning to plan where to deploy our science instruments. Within two or three months, the arm will deploy the mission’s main science instruments, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) and Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instruments.”


-->

No comments:

Post a Comment