Some New InSight

Yesterday the NASA InSight mission successfully touched down on Mars. While it was the eighth NASA mission to reach the red planet's surface, it was the first in a few new categories: first mission to send information via cubesat orbiters, first mission to deploy instruments by itself upon reaching the surface, the first mission to launch from the west coast of the United States, and the first mission to drill into another planet. Sure, all those things sound cool, but why should we care?

Celebrations in the mission control room at JPL in Pasadena, CA after
confirmation of InSight's successful landing came through.

First, a bit of backstory. Every NASA mission that has flown in the past decade has been the winner in a multi-stage selection contest that NASA administrators run. We'll go into more detail in a later post since the process is fairly intricate, but the basics are that many missions submit their plans to a NASA request for proposals, then some of those are selected to move on and create prototypes and more precise mission plans, and from those only one mission is selected. The InSight mission was initially one of 28 mission proposals submitted to NASA in 2010. In May 2011, it became one of three selected from the whole pool to develop more details about the mission and begin some work on building and testing instruments. In August 2012, just days after the Curiosity lander successfully landed on Mars, the InSight mission was selected for development and flight.

InSight uses updated versions of technology that was first included on the Phoenix Mars lander, which successfully landed on Mars a decade ago (2008). To reduce the risks of future missions, NASA likes to select missions that make use of any instrument or mission piece that has already flown on a mission and worked. These missions components are called heritage pieces because they have been inherited down to a newer mission from an older one. The instruments are never exactly the same, even if scientists and engineers want them to be--manufacturers discontinue electronics, technologies improve, etc. Engineers are responsible for extensively testing every single mechanical aspect of the mission in a number of ways--extreme heat, extreme cold, and high radiation are only a few of the environmental factors that a space mission will experience in its lifetime. Of course, the instruments must not only survive, they need to work too, and it's much better to work out issues ahead of time than after launch.

Testing the robotic arm that will deploy the SEIS
instrument. Photo credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech

The seismometer on InSight is a good example of when extensive testing uncovered a problem that could have jeopardized the whole mission. The Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument was built by the French National Space Agency CNES, and will be responsible for obtaining seismic data of Mars, which is effectively the reason that this mission was selected in the first place. Without it, the mission will not be able to collect any seismic information of Mars. Clearly, it was a key part of the mission. During testing, the engineers discovered multiple small leaks in its vacuum chamber that actually holds the seismometer. The leaks were severe enough that the mission's launch date was pushed back from March 2016 to May 2018. The overall cost of this delay was great in both time and money; it cost roughly $150 million to redesign the vacuum chamber, rebuild it, retest it, and pay for the time of the people who worked on it.

InSight launched on May 5, 2018 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, a location on the coast in between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Most NASA missions launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, though some launch from the Wallops Island Flight Facility in Maryland, so InSight is unusual in this regard. Vandenberg was selected because of its good positioning to aim the spacecraft to enter the Mars atmosphere at the correct angle of 12 degrees. Any steeper and the mission would burn up. Any shallower and the mission would "bounce" off the top of the atmosphere and continue off into deep space, lost forever. It was 12 degrees, or failure. If anything, this illustrates to me that there are many precise calculations that go into making every single decision on a NASA mission, and one miscalculation could cost the whole mission.

After 6 months and 301 million miles, InSight finally entered Mars' atmosphere at a perfect 12 degree angle. Much has been written and said about what happened during the landing, so we'll point you to one of our favorites instead of rehashing it here. In about 3 month InSight will deploy its own instruments, including the seismometer and an instrument that will drill 16 feet down into Mars' crust to study the thermal environment of Mars beneath the surface.

A screenshot of the NASA InSight landing live-feed on November 26, 2018, showing the first picture InSight took of Mars' surface. The line in the background is the Martian horizon. The camera lens is still behind the dust cap in this image,  but that piece will be removed in a couple of days, after the dust settles.

Just to prove that it made it to the surface, InSight was programmed to take a couple of pictures at the surface and send them back to us here on Earth. Its relay system is the Mars Cube One (MarCO), an important first for this mission as well. MarCO are two 6U cube sat missions that was designed to relay messages back and forth between Earth and InSight on Mars while it was going through its landing process. What is a cube sat? Generally the larger a mission is, the more expensive it is. A cube sat is a mission that is roughly the size of a shoebox, and it's a type of mission that has become more popular in the past 5 years because they are small, quick and easy to build, and inexpensive. A "U" is a shorthand to refer to the size of a cube sat mission, where a U is a cube with 10 cm sides. A 6U cube sat, therefore, is one that is 30 cm long, 20 cm wide, and 10 cm tall. MarCO was a test to see how well cube sats would work in a deep space environment, one that it passed with flying colors. This will pave the way for future cube sat add-on components to larger missions and even individual cube sat missions (see LunaH-Map here).

All of these accomplishments were the results of years of hard work by its team members and the mission failures that happened before. We thank all the scientists and engineers who have study and do study Mars, and all the people who support them, and wish them all many congratulations! Here's to future breakthroughs on Mars!