According to foreign media BGR, the NASA (NASA) InSight lander has been in trouble for the past few months. NASA has incredible luck on the Mars mission, Unfortunately, it looks like InSight will prove to be one of the more troublesome missions the space agency has ever launched to the red planet. People might think that the lander mission will be easier to complete than the rover adventure, but InSight has proven wrong in this regard.
This is not to say that InSight failed in general, but that this mission encountered more challenges. The self-hammer "mole" tool that was supposed to be buried on the surface of Mars has now been abandoned. Its failure is indeed regrettable. Now NASA is working hard to study how to detect earthquakes on Mars more accurately in the changing weather. In a new article from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the InSight team revealed what it is doing to calm the situation.
InSight has a lot of instruments that can be used - now the'Mole' has officially ended its trip to Mars, - but its most important instrument is a large seismometer with a dome-shaped shell . NASA plans to use this seismic sensor to record earthquakes on Mars, but scientists soon realized that the dome-shaped shell is not enough to prevent the wind from recording the sensor's false readings.
Unfortunately, now that the spacecraft has landed, there is nothing to do with the wind, but another problem with the reading is that the long cable connecting the seismic sensor and the lander itself seems to be making noise. It is believed that extreme temperature fluctuations on the Martian surface-from nearly minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit at night to 32 degrees Fahrenheit during the day-cause the material in the cable to expand and contract. When this happens, the cable'pops out' in the same way as when a piece of metal on the earth undergoes a drastic temperature change.
Since it is impossible to go to Mars to perform maintenance tasks and replace the cable with something else, the InSight team must adapt accordingly.The team's approach is to use the lander's robotic arm and shovel attachment to collect Martian soil, and then throw it on the cable. This is a bit like digging up sand with construction toys when I was young, except that this is a NASA mission that cost more than 800 million US dollars.
The InSight team hopes that by covering the cable with soil, the cable will not be so susceptible to temperature changes. If the cable can heat up and cool down at a slower rate, it may help prevent bouncing behavior and reduce noise in the reading.
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