Next NASA Mission To Mars Reaches Development Milestone | Aero-News Network
Aero-News Network
RSS icon RSS feed
podcast icon MP3 podcast
Subscribe Aero-News e-mail Newsletter Subscribe

Airborne Unlimited -- Most Recent Daily Episodes

Episode Date

Airborne-Monday

Airborne-Tuesday

Airborne-Wednesday Airborne-Thursday

Airborne-Friday

Airborne On YouTube

Airborne-Unlimited-05.22.23

Airborne-NextGen-05.23.23!

Program Delayed--ANN Staff Have Bad Colds! Program Delayed--ANN Staff Have Bad Colds!

Airborne-Unlimited-05.26.23

Check Out The Archives Of ALL The AEA 2023 Coverage at www.airborne-live.net

Sun, Nov 23, 2014

Next NASA Mission To Mars Reaches Development Milestone

'InSight' On Track For March, 2016 Launch

NASA's InSight mission has begun the assembly, test and launch operations (ATLO) phase of its development, on track for a March 2016 launch to Mars.

The lander, its aeroshell and cruise stage are being assembled by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver.

"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."

Over the next six months, technicians at Lockheed Martin will add subsystems such as avionics, power, telecomm, mechanisms, thermal systems and navigation systems onto the spacecraft. The propulsion system was installed earlier this year on the lander's main structure.

"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 a lot like the Phoenix lander we built, but most of the electronic components are similar to what is currently flying on the MAVEN spacecraft."

InSight stands for "Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport," and it is more than a Mars mission. This NASA Discovery-class mission is a terrestrial planet explorer that will address one of the most fundamental issues of planetary and solar system science: understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago.

To investigate the planet's interior, the stationary lander will carry a robotic arm that will deploy surface and burrowing instruments contributed by France and Germany. The national space agencies of France and Germany -- Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), respectively -- are partnering with NASA by providing InSight's two main science instruments.

The Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) will be built by CNES in partnership with DLR and the space agencies 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, from DLR, will measure heat coming toward the surface from the planet's interior.

Guided by images of the surroundings taken by the lander, 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.

Another experiment will use the radio link between InSight and NASA's Deep Space Network antennas on Earth to measure precisely a wobble in Mars' rotation that could reveal whether the planet has a molten or solid core. Wind and temperature sensors from Spain's Centro de Astrobiologia and a pressure sensor will monitor weather at the landing site, and a magnetometer will measure magnetic disturbances caused by the Martian ionosphere.

(Image provided by Lockheed Martin. Technicians in a Lockheed Martin clean room near Denver 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 for start of the mission's assembly, test and launch operations (ATLO) phase)

FMI: http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov

Advertisement

More News

Klyde Morris (05.29.23)

Klyde Opines On the Glamorous Profession of Corporate Piloting FMI: www.klydemorris.com>[...]

ANN's Daily Aero-Term (05.26.23): Sail Back

Sail Back A maneuver during high wind conditions (usually with power off) where float plane movement is controlled by water rudders/opening and closing cabin doors.>[...]

ANN's Daily Aero-Linx (05.26.23)

Aero Linx: HC-130J Combat King II The HC-130J replaces HC-130P/Ns as the only dedicated fixed-wing Personnel Recovery platform in the Air Force inventory. It is an extended-range v>[...]

ANN FAQ: Turn On Post Notifications

Make Sure You NEVER Miss A New Story From Aero-News Network Do you ever feel like you never see posts from a certain person or page on Facebook or Instagram? Here’s how you c>[...]

Aero-News: Quote of the Day (05.27.23)

"This partnership with ZeroAvia is an opportunity to take a new step towards a more sustainable aviation. Liquid hydrogen is considered the most advantageous state for tomorrow's a>[...]

blog comments powered by Disqus



Advertisement

Advertisement

Podcasts

Advertisement

© 2007 - 2023 Web Development & Design by Pauli Systems, LC