If you're feeling down, know that we've just buried a heat sensor in an alien planet. If NASA can get through Mars soil, we can get through 2020 NASA’s off-again, on-again Mars digger nicknamed the mole is finally buried in the planet’s soil and will take readings beneath the surface next year. If you’ve been following this Martian drama closely, you’ll know that the instrument, which came to the unforgiving dust world with NASA's InSight lander, has been in a spot of …
Space - it's the realm of TRUE hackers, steely-eyed missile-men, the sparkiest of sparks, and the maddest of mad scientists.
studying Mars this way should reveal a lot, including the presence of water in the soil, deeper down where it's not sublimating so much.
Mars' atmosphere is 95% CO2 but extremely thin. Temperatures (below -60F) are such that CO2 is probably as effective as it can be at absorbing IR being radiated out into space, but being so thin, is unlikely to do a whole lot of good. The partial pressure of CO2 is around 600 pascals, if I deduce it correctly (from various sources), as compared to less than 50 pascals for earth (0.04%). Obviously there's more going on than just the partial pressure of CO2, which affects how well it can react with IR radiation escaping into space. 1 Atmosphere on earth is around 101,325 pascals (for those who didn't know already, _I_ had to look it up, I'm used to psi, tor, and bars). The rest is just maths.
So as a result you have a case where the atmosphere probably is NOT going to have a great effect on temperature of the soil. And so the probe can measure deeper down and figure out what's happening at the "permafrost" layer, if there is one [or would be one] and get a really good picture of what's going on planet-wide. And I think they may find that there's water or ice 'down there' making a HUGE difference in temperatures. [probably what they're looking for, I say]. and of course, instruments top side to relay the data and take its OWN measurements.
Should be fun.
I think that a substantial reason that there's a much smaller greenhouse effect on Mars is that it's so dry. Water vapour is an aggressive greenhouse gas, and does a lot of the work on Earth. But there's almost no water vapour in the atmosphere of Mars. Water vapour doesn't control the effect on Earth because there's a vast sink/source of it (the oceans), so the amount in the atmosphere can't be tweaked the way CO2 can: if you add a bunch of water vapour you get rain, if you pull a bunch out you get evaporation.
Admittedly the name in the title is already taken (by a Mars rover) but it perfectly encapsulates the efforts of the boffins and the digger itself.
It also captures the NASA ethos of working around problems until they come to a solution.
Here's hoping the Insight lander will provide years of insights in the future.
(And let's hope it doesn't find that Mars might have COVID - the lander isn't designed for social distancing.)
Presumably "more" isn't really the most useful metric; and something like "most interesting" or "most useful" would be preferable. Which is not to say that either remote or in-person is better, just that (as an extreme "straw man" example) terabytes of high resolution images and measurements of a single randomly chosen rock might give you the most data, but not really be what is wanted.
as long as the remote connectivity works, any competent IT pro can put up with crappy baud rates, limited UIs, and unnecessarily slow response times, and STILL get the job done faster than actually BEING there... while in his underwear, sipping adult beverages and/or caffeine sources.
icon, because [answered my own question, heh]
Great work from the whole team to get the mole in and working.
The best description I can give you for how hard this mission is/was is as follows:
I need you to drill a hole in a wall. Here's a picture from Google Maps of the house. Choose a drill bit and the feeds and speeds you're going to use.
What do you mean you need more information?
That's effectively what the mole team needed to do. You have pictures of the area you're going to dig in, you have the experience of what other landers have encountered in other parts of Mars, but you cant say exactly what will be in the area where you will actually land. Based on the other landers, the Duricrust (the part of the soil that clumps together and doesnt refill into the hole) was only expected to be 5-10cm deep as a maximum. But here it turned out to be about 25cm deep, which really screwed with the ability of the mole to operate. One of Mars's little jokes no doubt.
So to find a way to get the Mole deep enough to operate, was really a great achievement for the whole team. Beers for all involved...
From an Ex-mole team member.... :)
Reminds me of when the central heating boiler was fitted. Cutting a square hole in the wall for the flue was expected to be a quick bash - until they found the ground floor external wall was made of engineering bricks.
Can always tell when new neighbours decide to hang up a fitting in the kitchen - you hear their drill going for ages. To cut an inset for a power socket took me nearly two hours by drilling a tight matrix of holes and then using the cold chisel.
On the other hand the upstairs rooms' external walls are breeze block - drills like butter.
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