NASA 화성탐사선 '인사이트'호 화성 안착…탐사활동 시작 VIDEO: InSight lander touches down on Mars – as it happened

InSight lander touches down on Mars – as it happened

Joy and cheering at Nasa as Insight lander touches down on the red planet: ‘Touchdown confirmed!’

Ian Sample Science editor

Mon 26 Nov 2018 

Celebrations among the mission control team at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Photograph: Al Seib/EPA

NASA 화성탐사선 '인사이트'호 화성 안착…탐사활동 시작    미 항공우주국(NASA)의 화성탐사선 '인사이트(InSight)호가 206일간의 항해 끝에 26일(현지시간) 화성 적도 인근의 엘리시움 평원에 무사히 도착했다. 인사이트호는 오후 2시54분(미 동부시간), 한국시간으로는 27일 오전4시54분에 화성에 도착했다. 지난 5월5일 발사돼 4억8000만㎞를 날아가 화성에 안착하자 실시간 중계방송을 하던 미 언론들은 일제히 터치다운에 성공했다는 낭보를 긴급뉴스로 보도했다. CBS뉴스는 인사이트호가 6분30초 동안의 아슬아슬한 대기권 진입 하강 착륙을 무사히 해냈다고 전했다.인사이트호가 성공적으로 화성 표면에 착륙했는지 여부는 무선신호를 통해 지구로 전달됐다. 화성에서 지구까지 신호가 전달되는 데 걸리는 시간은 8분7초가량이다. 시속 12300마일의 속도로 우주를 날아간 인사이트호는 붉은 행성으로 불리는 화성을 누비고 난 후, 이 붉은 행성의 숨겨진 내부를 탐사하기 위한 임무를 시작했다. 인사이트호는 화성을 돌아다니지 않고 엘리시움 평원 한 지점에 머무르며 지표면에서 전파를 흘려보내 주파수 변화를 감지하고, 압축공기드릴을 이용해 화성 토양을 5m가량 파헤쳐 온도를 측정한다. cnbc.com edited by kcontenst 이를 통해 화성 내부에 존재할 것으로 추정되는 맨틀의 실재 여부와 그 크기 등을 관측할 수 있다. 인사이트호의 이같은 탐사 결과는 '제2의 지구'로 불리는 화성에서 실제 인류가 생존할 수 있을지에 대해 많은 단서를 제공할 것으로 보인다.  인사이트호의 탐사 데이터는 화성 궤도를 정찰하고 있는 NASA의 쌍둥이 위성인 '마르코(MarCO)'를 통해 지구로 보내질 예정이다. 뉴시스   출처 : http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2018/11/27/2018112700438.html

edited by kcontents

After a seven-month, 300m-mile journey, Nasa’s Mars InSight probe has reached its destination and touched down near the red planet’s equator.

The lander came to a rest on the dusty surface shortly before 8pm GMT on Monday after a nail-biting descent that started when the spacecraft slammed into the Martian atmosphere at 12,300mph and ended minutes later with the probe settled on the ground, its thrusters quiet.

Mission scientists cheered, hugged and fist-bumped at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California when the lander beamed home signals of its arrival on the planet. “It was intense; you could feel the emotion,” said Jim Bridenstine, Nasa’s administrator. “What a day for Nasa.”

via cbsn youtube

edited by kcontents

InSight’s landing spot, Elysium Planitia, is one of the most boring places on the alien world: a vast, smooth lava plain that the US space agency calls “the biggest parking lot on Mars”. But a featureless, and hopefully quiet, landscape is precisely what InSight needs for its mission to map the interior of the planet.

“This is our first opportunity to look deep inside another planet, to look at the structure and find out why it ended up the way it did,” said Rain Irshad, the autonomous systems group leader at RAL Space in Oxfordshire, and one of several UK scientists who worked on InSight’s instruments.

InSight sent its first picture back within minutes of its new home. It was smudged and obscured by dust kicked up during the landing, but much clearer pictures are expected to be sent back soon.

Tom Hoffman of Nasa points to the first picture of Mars sent back by the InSight lander

 Tom Hoffman of Nasa with the first picture sent back from Mars by InSight. Photograph: Reuters

The $814m (£635m) lander will use a suite of instruments to study the makeup and dimensions of the planet’s core, mantle and crust. Armed with that data, scientists hope to learn how Mars – and other rocky worlds – formed at the dawn of the solar system 4.6bn years ago.

Sending a probe to Mars, whether to land, orbit or fly past, is a risky business: only 40% of missions have succeeded. Nasa is the only space agency to have pulled off a Mars landing, most recently in 2012 when the Curiosity rover was winched to the surface by a hovering “sky crane”.

In 2016, the European Space Agency attempted to put its own lander on Mars, but the Schiaparelli probe shut down 

its retro-rockets too soon and smashed into the ground.

The InSight lander had to perform flawlessly to touch down safely. Soon after it hit the thin Martian atmosphere, it released a parachute, then blasted off its heat shield and fired retro-thrusters to slow its descent.

Confirmation that InSight had survived what Nasa called “the seven minutes of terror” was beamed back to Earth via satellites that trailed the probe to its destination.

InSight, which is short for Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, will use three instruments to study Mars.

A seismometer deployed by a robot arm will act as an ear to the ground and listen for tremors produced when subterranean rock faces slip past one another on geological fault lines. These pressure waves bounce around inside the planet, and can reveal crucial information about its structure.

Mission scientists expect InSight to record anything from a dozen to 100 Marsquakes of magnitude 3.5 or greater over the lander’s two-year mission. The seismometer is so sensitive it can detect vibrations smaller than the width of an atom.

“The most important question is whether Mars is seismically active,” said Neil Bowles, a planetary scientist at Oxford University, who worked on the spacecraft.

“We have indirect evidence for shaking on the surface, for example by looking at boulders rolling down slopes in images from orbit, but InSight will be the first mission to place a seismometer directly on the surface of Mars.

“Measuring Marsquakes will give information on Mars’ internal structure and hopefully reveal more about how the planet formed. Why is Mars smaller and with a lower density than Earth and Venus? It suggests that Mars’ formation and evolution was somehow different to Earth’s or some process in the early solar system prevented Mars from growing bigger.”

      

Another instrument, a heat probe, will burrow 5 metres into the ground and measure the rate at which heat rises through the planet.

In a third experiment, mission scientists will use antennas on the lander to track its position with such precision they can deduce how much Mars wobbles on its axis. The amount of wobble reflects the size of the planet’s core and whether it is molten or solid.

Earth’s rotating molten iron core generates the magnetic field that shields life from harmful radiation, and helps prevent the atmosphere from being stripped away by high-energy particles in the solar wind.

At some point in its history, Mars lost its magnetic field and much of its atmosphere, causing temperatures to drop and exposing the surface to intense radiation. InSight may help explain why, said Irshad.

“Are there conditions under the surface that might have meant life went down there in order to survive?” she said. “If it retreated beneath the surface, future missions might find it there.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/26/nasas-mars-insight-probe-touches-down-on-mars

 

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