P_E_T_E_R
Aktives Mitglied
Hier ist auch noch ein Statusbericht mit weiteren Details zur Mole story auf S&T:
A Strategy to Get the Mars Insight Lander Back in the Drilling Business
Engineers first suspected that a rock had blocked the mole, but lab tests offered another option. The mole drills by using the friction of the loose soil flowing around it to counter its own recoil action. Engineers suspected that a lack of friction was causing the hammering spike to simply bounce in place.
Lab tests were conducted at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, with an Insight "twin" working in material similar to Martian soil, in the so-called Mars yard." Tests were also conducted at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which had developed and built the HP3 package for the Insight mission.
Uncovering the hole hammered out by the mole and getting a good look at it this past weekend provided initial confirmation of engineeers' suspicions: The mole has dug a small pit around itself into the unexpectedly loose soil, causing it to bounce in place rather than dig straight down.
“The images coming back from Mars confirm what we've seen in our testing here on Earth,” says Mattias Grott (DLR) in a recent press release. “This cohesive soil is compacting into the walls as the mole hammers.”
A Strategy to Get the Mars Insight Lander Back in the Drilling Business
Engineers first suspected that a rock had blocked the mole, but lab tests offered another option. The mole drills by using the friction of the loose soil flowing around it to counter its own recoil action. Engineers suspected that a lack of friction was causing the hammering spike to simply bounce in place.
Lab tests were conducted at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, with an Insight "twin" working in material similar to Martian soil, in the so-called Mars yard." Tests were also conducted at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which had developed and built the HP3 package for the Insight mission.
Uncovering the hole hammered out by the mole and getting a good look at it this past weekend provided initial confirmation of engineeers' suspicions: The mole has dug a small pit around itself into the unexpectedly loose soil, causing it to bounce in place rather than dig straight down.
“The images coming back from Mars confirm what we've seen in our testing here on Earth,” says Mattias Grott (DLR) in a recent press release. “This cohesive soil is compacting into the walls as the mole hammers.”