The entire InSight mission from start to finish, plus everything it discovered.Discover our full back catalogue of hundreds of videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@astrumspaceFor early access videos, bonus content, and to support the channel, join us on Patreon: https://astrumspace.info/4ayJJuZ
Chapter 1: What is the InSight mission about?
From its incredible launch on the 5th of May 2018, to the present day as it reached its ultimate powering down, InSight has been an incredible lander. It has peeled back the surface of Mars and listened to the planet's slow heartbeat to gain knowledge unseen by any mission that has gone on before it. It has faced adversity.
From day one, Mars fought back with an unending assault to wear it down, or catch it off guard. But ultimately, its contributions to our planetary understanding are irrefutable. And it did so with a surprising tool, the planet's quakes. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. Come with me and discover how Insight did what it did, as well as exactly what it learned.
In this Supercut, we will explore the mission of Insight as it happened. In the early hours of the morning of the 5th of May 2018, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Space Launch Complex 3E in California, NASA scientists waited in nervous anticipation at their computers.
Outside in the darkness stood an Atlas V rocket, a nearly 60-metre tall, two-stage behemoth capable of lifting nearly 9,000 kilograms into geostationary orbit. Atlas V rockets like this one have launched dozens of times, but it's impossible not to feel a degree of nervousness with each new attempt.
Last time this launch was scheduled, it had to be pushed by several months because of a vacuum leak involving the size instruments in its cargo. Over half the missions to Mars to this date had either never left the ground or failed once they arrived on Mars. Even at this stage, there is always a chance of something going wrong.
The Atlas V was here to carry insight, a lander task with uncovering Mars' inner structure by studying seismic vibrations. It was not the first lander to attempt this, but it hoped to be the first one to succeed. NASA had sent two prior missions to Mars with seismometers, Viking 1 and Viking 2.
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Chapter 2: How did the launch of InSight unfold?
However, Viking 1's seismometer malfunctioned on landing and could not deploy, and while Viking 2's seismometer did manage to get readings, there was no way of telling whether what it read was a seismic vibration or just the wind. This degree of uncertainty made its readings less reliable. With InSight, NASA would attempt to close this potential source of error. The signal came.
Scientists received their last weather reports. Launching a rocket is a risky business. Wind speed, cloud coverage, even solar weather can negatively influence a launch. All must be accounted for. But here, they were given the green light. InSight would be launched within the hour.
InSight is a meter high, six meter long lander sporting two large solar panels, in a similar design to the Phoenix lander. It comes equipped with multiple instruments for scientific research. It carries a seismometer with a windshield, and a robotic arm that will place the sensitive instruments onto the flat surface of the Martian planet.
With this, it will detect the vibrations caused by quakes in the Martian mantle, or by meteor impacts. Through careful evaluation of the time delay between the various kinds of seismic waves from a single event, it will be possible for scientists to piece together Mars' inner structure with a greater degree of certainty than ever before. But that is not all.
Attached is a suite of weather sensing equipment to eliminate any debate as to the source of the vibrations it was detecting, not to mention helping scientists to better understand the climate on Mars.
And to give it an even greater understanding of the state of Mars beneath its surface, it carries a mole, a hammer-powered digging tool intended to burrow deep into the Martian soil and take temperature readings. A large drill would not be economical to carry, so this was thought to be a more efficient design.
The better we understand the structure of Mars, the more we can learn about its formation, and with it, the formation of other rocky planets in our solar system, like our own. With InSight, we hope to learn if Earth is an anomaly in the solar system. Are many of the other planets like us? What does this say about our formation?
And so, at around 4 o'clock in the morning, InSight launched for Mars, causing bone crushing g-forces. The first stage of the rocket burned for just 253 seconds before its fuel was expended and it detached. Then the second stage, Centaur, kicked in. This burned for another 14 minutes, which was enough time to reach escape velocity. inside had been built to resist the strain.
This first stage was a success, but now it would be time for the long trip through space. It would take another six and a half months to travel across the 484 million kilometres between Earth and Mars. These months would be quiet, serene and cold as it drifts through the star-studded vastness of space. InSight's arrival on Mars would be quite the opposite experience.
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Chapter 3: What instruments does InSight carry for research?
This whole process took place over the course of 7 minutes. It touched down successfully on the 26th of November 2018. Upon impact with the surface, the rockets kicked up a lot of dust. This is not very good for solar panels, so InSight waited 16 minutes before deploying its solar array to let the dust settle. This impressive unfurling can be seen in this testing environment before it launched.
On Mars, these panels generate around 300 to 600 watts under normal conditions. However, dust in the atmosphere does affect power generation, as clouds would on Earth, so this can be different every day. Let's pause now and take a look around. The view that greeted InSight seems bleak and inhospitable, but it would need to get used to it.
This rock-strewn, flat, dusty terrain would be its home for at least the next two years. Now, InSight was intended to be a two-year mission. Unlike rovers, it had no tools for moving itself around, but that would not be necessary to fulfil its purpose. Its mission was to sit, listen and learn. It had a lot of work to do. InSight's mission to Mars had begun.
Far above the thin Martian atmosphere, a strange new sight had arrived. Two little lights twinkled in the night sky. These were not new stars, they were CubeSats called Marco A and B, and they had been following InSight for the last several months.
Their mission was to relay real-time information back to Earth about whether the landing had been successful or not, and if the solar cells had deployed. The Marco mission was a technology demonstration mission, so it didn't have any scientific instruments, but rather it carried different technologies to test. These satellites were really small, only the size of a briefcase.
They were the first time CubeSats had been sent into deep space, and at the time, no one was sure how well they would do. but so far they had performed exactly as hoped for. The Marcos began listening out for UHF frequencies from inside with the antenna on the bottom of the spacecraft, ready to transmit that data back to Earth using this bigger antenna.
This big antenna operates like a satellite dish on Earth, except they designed it to be flat so it could be space efficient. Amazingly, these satellites only generate 17 watts of power, yet are able to receive signals from the surface of Mars and transmit millions of kilometres back to Earth. Of course, NASA was not going to put all their eggs in one untested basket.
If Marco A and B hadn't worked, InSight would also be able to communicate with some of the other orbiters already around Mars, like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The only difference is that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can't relay information back in real time. These lights would not be in the sky for long though.
After performing their mission, the Marco CubeSats would fly by Mars, unable to slow down enough to enter orbit, and instead go on forever to drift around the Sun. But that is not what InSight sees. InSight does not know the fate of the machines that broadcast its messages.
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Chapter 4: How did InSight land on Mars?
The first thing it recorded was the Martian wind, picking up vibrations sensed by the seismometer still on the lander. This is what it sounds like, although I should note that you will probably either need a subwoofer or headphones to hear this. This has not been sped up. These literally are the vibrations caused by Martian wind going over the solar panels of the lander.
The frequency of the vibrations converted to audio. For the benefit of those who can't hear it, here it is pitched up by two octaves.
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InSight can also detect changes in air pressure. Here is the air pressure changing as the wind blows across the lander. This audio has been sped up by a factor of 100 for it to be within human hearing range.
What is fascinating is that we don't just have to imagine the wind passing by InSight, as it was also able to capture footage of water ice clouds passing by overhead, visibly showing the direction of the wind. Yes, although Mars is currently a barren wasteland, there is still a tiny amount of water vapour in the atmosphere.
Now limbered up, its warm-up science done, InSight was ready for the main event. One of its primary missions on Mars was to listen out for seismic activity, but its seismometer, or size, was still strapped down on InSight's body. It would need to use its robotic arm to lift its size instrument and place it directly onto the Martian soil. But not just anywhere would do.
If it was going to settle in for a long two years of listening, InSight wanted to choose the best patch of ground. Something flat, with no rocks in the way, so its windshield could lie flush with the ground and provide a perfect sound barrier, providing a means for SAIS to collect its data uninterrupted. And it had a team to help it.
Almost immediately after landing, InSight started collecting 3D images of its surrounding area in order to find the perfect spot to place the seismometer. Based on those 3D images, NASA actually recreated this area as accurately as possible back on Earth, even going as far as using the HoloLens augmented reality headset to match up the surface of Mars with the environment they were recreating.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did InSight face during its mission?
Detecting seismic activity is not all InSight can do. InSight was acting like a little weather station on Mars, with instruments detecting wind, air pressure and air temperature. As you can see, even at the equator, Mars is a chilly minus 25 degrees Celsius at its warmest at the moment, bottoming out at minus 100 degrees Celsius.
These low temperatures are a threat to any mechanical Martian mission. The fluctuations into freezing cold can cause weathering on scientific equipment that can quickly break them. If it weren't for onboard heaters powered by InSight solar panels, InSight would have already been in big trouble.
InSight was also able to detect some gusts of up to 60km per hour, and low air pressures, about 6 millibar, compared to Earth's 1 bar With its first readings taken, but also with its first obstacles encountered, Insight's mission was underway to mixed fanfare. Let us jump forward now in time. Months have ticked by. InSight now approached its first year mark on Mars.
Scientists had been considering the problem of InSight's mole. By this point, they began to be more certain that it was not an underground rock that had stopped the mole in its tracks. Scientists had chosen this landing site especially because there were few large rocks in the area, and the mole had been designed in such a way that it should have been able to go around small rocks.
The team had taken their time to think through what might be causing the problem, doing their best to create a replica of the situation on Earth using data from InSight's cameras. This isn't the perfect process, as it's impossible to perfectly mimic the lower gravitational conditions of Mars on Earth even with replicas made from scaled-down, lighter materials.
But by October 2019, they had figured out that the likely problem was indeed a lack of friction. When taking photos of the soil around the now exposed mole, they saw that the soil in this spot was different from what they'd been expecting.
Although the surface you see here certainly appears loose and dusty, ideal for hammering based digging, only a few inches deeper there appeared to be a layer of cemented soil known as duricrust. These particles of duracrust stick together more tightly, which means they won't fall into the hole the mole is creating, and thus weren't providing the friction necessary to dig deeper.
Scientists hadn't realised that this type of soil was here when they picked the site for landing, as it had been hidden under the surface. But what to do about it? While InSight was equipped with a robotic arm, the top of the mole was not designed to be grabbed by this arm, so they couldn't just move it to another position.
And as you can see here, there is a delicate cable designed to relay data from the mole back to InSight, which would be damaged if they just pushed down on the top of the pole with the arm. So, their first plan was to place the arm next to the digging mole, pinning the mole in place. Perhaps this would provide the friction necessary to get it started. Unfortunately, this proved to be not enough.
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