Fwd: Final Assembly Begins for NASA’s Next Mars Lander - InSight

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From: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Date: November 20, 2014 at 6:36:28 PM CST
To: "Gary Johnson" <gjohnson144@comcast.net>
Subject: FW: Final Assembly Begins for NASA's Next Mars Lander - InSight

 

 

AmericaSpace

For a nation that explores
November 19th, 2014 

Final Assembly Begins for NASA's Next Mars Lander - InSight

By Ken Kremer

 

Technicians in a Lockheed Martin clean room prepare NASA's InSight Mars lander for propulsion proof and leak testing on Oct. 31, 2014. Following the test, the lander was moved to another clean room where it will undergo the assembly phase of ATLO during the next six months. Credit: Lockheed Martin

NASA's next Mars lander – the InSight spacecraft – has reached the start of its critical final assembly operations phase known as ATLO, or assembly, test and launch operations.

InSight's construction is on track for its scheduled departure from Earth to the Red Planet in March 2016.

InSight, which stands for Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is a stationary lander. The vehicle will join NASA's current pair of surface explorers, Curiosity and Opportunity, which in contrast are mobile rovers. It will touch down near the Martian equator in late 2016 near Curiosity.

The three legged InSight lander will conduct an unprecedented mission to investigate the Red Planets deep interior – elucidating the nature and evolution of the Martian core, measuring heat flow and sensing for "Marsquakes."

The $425 million solar powered lander, its aeroshell and cruise stage are all being fabricated by prime contractor Lockheed Martin in a Denver, Co., clean room.

"Reaching this stage that we call ATLO is a critical milestone," said InSight Project Manager Tom Hoffman at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

"This is a very satisfying point of the mission as we transition from many teams working on their individual elements to integrating these elements into a functioning system. The subsystems are coming from all over the globe, and the ATLO team works to integrate them into the flight vehicle. We will then move rapidly to rigorous testing when the spacecraft has been assembled, and then to the launch preparations."

NASA's Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission will pierce beneath the Martian surface to study its interior. Insight will hammer the deepest ever hole into the Red Planet to elucidate clues to the Martian core and how Earth-like planets formed. Launch is scheduled for March 2016. Credit: NASA

The lander will really take shape over the next six months as Lockheed Martin technicians add the probes assorted subsystems including avionics, power, telecomm, mechanisms, thermal systems and navigation systems. They installed the propulsion system onto the framework earlier this year.

The cruise stage assembly work includes adding communications systems, solar power arrays and thrusters to navigate the spacecraft on the months long interplanetary journey to the Red Planet.

Liftoff of InSight atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is scheduled for March 2016 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. This marks NASA's first ever interplanetary mission to launch from California.

The vehicle design is based on the proven platform of NASA's three-legged Phoenix Mars probe – also built by Lockheed Martin – which successfully touched down on the planets frigid northern polar regions in 2008 in search of potential habitats for life.

InSight is an international science mission and a near duplicate of the Phoenix spacecraft, Bruce Banerdt, InSight Principal Investigator of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California, told me.

However the probe will incorporate some significant modifications to modernize the design based on advances developed for NASA's new MAVEN Mars orbiter which only recently achieved orbit in September 2014.

"The InSight mission is a mix of tried-and-true and new-and-exciting. The spacecraft has a lot of heritage from Phoenix and even back to the Viking landers, but the science has never been done before at Mars," said Stu Spath, InSight program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems.

"Physically, InSight looks very much like the Phoenix lander we built, but most of the electronic components are similar to what is currently flying on the MAVEN spacecraft."

NASA's upcoming InSight mission to the Red Planet. Image Credit: NASA

The life span, science goals and instrument suite on InSight are also completely different from Phoenix.

For example the planned mission duration is 720 days — about two years at the Red Planets sunny equator vs. 90 days for Phoenix in the bitterly cold Martian arctic region.

Furthermore, InSight is one of NASA's Discovery class missions like the Dawn Asteroid Orbiter for example. It also includes very significant international science participation.

InSight's purpose is to answer one of science's most fundamental questions: What were the processes that shaped how the planets were created four billion years ago, especially the terrestrial class planets like Earth?

InSight will mine the deepest hole yet into Mars with a self hammering 'mole' – to a depth of 3 to 5 meters – and unveil the nature of the mysterious deep interior and central core of the Red Planet.

Therefore InSight will penetrate far deeper than Phoenix ever could in order to investigate how Earth-like planets formed and developed their layered inner structure of core, mantle and crust by deploying never before used instruments onto the Martian surface to collect information about those interior zones.

Mars has the same basic internal structure as the Earth and other terrestrial (rocky) planets. It is large enough to have pressures equivalent to those throughout the Earth's upper mantle, and it has a core with a similar fraction of its mass. This diagram shows the depths at which high pressures cause certain minerals to transform to higher-density crystal structures In contrast, the pressure even near the center of the Moon barely reach that just below the Earth's crust and it has a tiny, almost negligible core. The size of Mars indicates that it must have undergone many of the same separation and crystallization processes that formed the Earth's crust and core during early planetary formation. Credit: NASA/JPL

InSight also possesses a robotic arm like Phoenix that's critical to achieving its science goals.

"The robotic arm is similar (but not identical) to the Phoenix arm," Banerdt explained to me.

In addition to NASA, it is funded by several European national space agency's and countries. Germany and France are providing InSight's two main science instruments; HP3 and SEIS through the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR, or German Space Agency) and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES).

The Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) will be built by CNES in partnership with DLR and the space agency's of Switzerland and the United Kingdom. It will measure waves of ground motion carried through the interior of the planet, from "marsquakes" and meteor impacts.

The Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3), from DLR, will measure heat coming toward the surface from the planet's interior.

The robotic arm will deploy the pair of surface and burrowing instruments contributed by France and Germany to suitable locations based on images taken by the landers pair of cameras.

InSight's robotic arm will place the seismometer on the surface and then place a protective covering over it to minimize effects of wind and temperature on the sensitive instrument. The arm will also put the heat-flow probe in position to hammer itself into the ground to a depth of 3 to 5 yards, or meters, according to a NASA description.

The third experiment named RISE (Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment) is to be provided by JPL and will use the spacecraft communication system and a radio link to NASA's Deep Space Network antennas on Earth to precisely measure a wobble in Mars' planetary rotation that could reveal whether Mars has a molten or solid core, and elucidate clues to its interior structure and composition.

NASA's Mars InSight spacecraft design is based on the successful 2008 Phoenix lander. This mosaic shows Phoenix touchdown atop Martian ice. Phoenix thrusters blasted away Martian soil and exposed water ice. InSight carries instruments to peer deep into the Red Planet and investigate the nature and size of the mysterious Martian core. Credit: Ken Kremer-kenkremer.com/Marco Di Lorenzo/NASA/JPL/UA/Max Planck Institute

 

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