Thanks for the link, Tom Tamlyn, which includes this assessment :

… its location, which closely resembles martian terrains previously scouted by the Spirit rover. For example, InSight landed in what’s called a hollow, a crater that has been filled in with soil and leveled flat.




So wasn't too far adrift.
Just sayin' ...!

Phoenix had a MARDI, though i recall it was never switched on due to some integration bug uncovered at the 11th hour that could have jeopardized the landing process. [EDIT: found the scoop on that]
I never thought about it until now, but I guess the Insight team decided to not to even include a MARDI for that or perhaps other reasons as well, so no descent images to help define the landing context.

We offered a number of options, but they chose not to use any of them (of course they had a cost.)

In all honesty the landing context argument isn't extremely compelling, assuming we get HiRISE images post-landing.

Missed with HiRISE. If only there was a wider-field "context camera"...

From the following three tweets:
https://twitter.com/HiRISE/status/1067874528187973632
https://twitter.com/HiRISE/status/1067874791648940032
https://twitter.com/HiRISE/status/1067875300178980865

Kudos to the MRO team for the great try. I doubt that many of us can appreciate the level of effort required to even attempt this sort of feat.

Onward!

From Science:

"Now, a friendly competition is on. Golombek and his peers hope to beat the satellites to fixing InSight’s location. They should have until 6 December, when an orbiter will likely capture it. Right now, they’re stretching out the scant imagery, trying to compare their hollow to existing high-resolution maps. Their job will get much easier next week, when the camera on the robotic arm’s elbow will be extended to photograph the lander’s terrain in detail."

What happened to the "raw" images page ?

https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/multimedia/raw-images/

There is none.

Er....yes there are.....???

I was thinking that Tim Parker in a couple of days after landing had Curiosity location to within 50cm using FHAZ, then realized InSight is in a parking lot without many features on the horizon. But if he managed to keep track of Opportunity while driving to Endeavour I'm pretty sure he will be able to do it in his sleep. ;-)

Paolo

This is odd. I updated the page after cache erase, and now I have the pictures…

The location 'race' is interesting, but the money quote there to me was that the elbow cam will begin surveying the surroundings next week.

We didn't see any new images appear on the "raw images" site during Sol 2. I'm guessing they must have taken some and downlinked them. Therefore, it appears that we do not have the near-real-time pipeline of images to the public like we've seen on some previous missions, right?

EDIT: I don't want to clutter the forum with a new post, and this forum doesn't support "likes", so ... thank you Doug for your insightful reply! (immediately below)

There are huge number of reasons that would cause there to be no images for a given sol. Spacecraft issues, DSN or Relay issues, to just straight up not commanding the acquisition of any images on a given sol.

The InSight raw image page is probably the best version of a raw image pipeline I've ever seen. There is no reason to suggest the pipeline is down right now.

We were warned that this would be a slower paced mission than we're used to.

I hope this is at least 51% relevant for this thread… I noticed last night that the ExoMars rover's landing platform will also have a seismometer onboard. With a landing date of April 2021, this creates a piquant proximity to Insight's end of main mission. It would surely be a value-add to have two working seismometers on Mars at the same time, so that the location of any large quakes could be pinpointed. It looks like they may overlap either for a short time, if Insight functions for just two years, or perhaps much longer if Insight has the kind of extended lifespan that other martian missions have had.

I see images using your link, but just the six. Three of each view. I wonder when new images will be coming.

This mission will definitely deviate from what we are used to. First, I'm still scratching my head at the torturously slow (three month) deployment of the two surface experiments. Most notably, this is not a picture taking mission. Furthermore, if it hadn't been for the delay over the seismometer, we'd be looking at black and white pictures only. The InSight project upgraded their cameras from single-channel greyscale to RGB colour by replacing the detectors with a Bayer-pattern version of the same resolution as the original detectors. This mission is not designed to take pretty pictures. It's designed to explore the interior of Mars. That will take some adjustments from the rovers where we get a new panorama every few sols.

They have to be much more careful with the robotic arm than Phoenix was. The latter could (and did) lose soil out of the scoop due to wind, or just dumped it on the deck of the lander because of how clumpy it was. InSight needs to do the reverse, and carefully take the seismometer, its cover, and heat flow probe into their appropriate spots. As I mentioned above, there is no spacecraft-killing winter at this latitude, so they really have no need to rush.

Presumably there will be curiosity style selfies taken by the camera on the instrument arm to check that the instruments did not move on the deck during the landing and to provide 3D maps of the instrument deployment area.

Keep in mind that on a day when we don't get a new image, other things are going on. I don't know what those things might be on any given day, but over the next week or so the arm and the instruments are probably being powered on and checked very carefully to ensure everything is in good shape. Nobody likes images more than I do, and we will see them soon.

Phil

Well in reality they are going to be deploying the instruments 2 or 3 times in the sandbox here on Earth, before they do it with Insight on Mars, so that takes time.

Between the two pictures, a small rectangular piece of equipment has rotated to the right just in front of the large square black thing, which reveals more of two mysterious white objects that look to be on the ground. I do not see any other white patches in the distance.

What is so mysterious about it? That "white patch" is a piece of lander deck hardware.

Another thing that is different about InSight is that from the beginning, they are not operating on Mars Time. They're working early and late slide sols as needed, but to keep operational costs lower they did not staff up to the level that would be required for Mars Time operations. So they'll spend some chunk of their time effectively in restricted sols.

I found a very detailed summary of deployment procedure/timeline here: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2018/11/ins...cience-mission/

Just a quick thought about the Insight payload. If the spacecraft did indeed land on a sand sheet or filled crater, it might be a problem for the seismometer. Any thickness of sand would, if I understand seismometers correctly, cause seismic signals to be dissipated before they reach the instrument. Sand, being much less compacted than rock, would not conduct a seismic signal nearly as well. Even soil should conduct better. I would love to be proven wrong. Alternate opinions welcomed.

It's super sensitive, it can detect half the movement made by the vibration of a hydrogen atom. If something bangs into Mars, it'll detect it.

Does anyone know if they have an official mission clock for InSight? Similar to the one we have for Curiosity link that shows the sol and current solar time.

Per the Science article I posted earlier, the team does not seem to be concerned about that; quite the opposite, in fact. I'd guess that level, stable placement is much more critical, and that they are able to compensate for any attenuation that might be induced by a few meters of sand (if there's that much.)

Also provides good digging for the mole, which could help refine their understanding of the sand's properties to further refine their seismic compensation model.

https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/

Agreed on the mole, guesstimate is about 3 meters of sand, probe has around 5 meters of tether, so they're good for getting to bedrock.
https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/spacecraft/instruments/seis/



If the sand were recent uncompacted dunes like you get on Earth seashore, that might be a problem.
Most dunes on Mars are suspected to be ancient, so the sand is likely filled in with fine dust.
The landing area is on the slope between the highlands and the lowlands,

Check out Figure #9 about possible sediment transport at the Highlands/Lowlands border
http://oro.open.ac.uk/56400/1/The%20Hypani...rly%20Mars_.pdf

if the lowlands were oceans, then mudflats, there ought to be a range of sediment paricle sizes, which bodes well for seismic transmission.

The seismometer is based on electronic components and it doesn't need to be laid on firm land or on a rock. It is like to ASLEP from Apollo missions from 12 to 17 which were laid on the moon's regolith.

What about the insulating effect of sand on heat flow? Ideally, wouldn't both the seismometer and the heat probe prefer not to be insulated from the bedrock by something porous and absorbent, like a layer of sand? The instruments may have been designed to see through a certain amount of softer material, but I don't see how it can fail to have some muffling effect.

We may hope that the ease-of-placement benefits of the sandy terrain can outweigh the sensitivity costs.

As I understand it, Seis (seismometer) and Hp3 (heat probe) are optimal in opposite situations, but are both workable in the expected middle ground that insight actually got.

The seismometer is designed to be supremely sensitive
https://www.seis-insight.eu/en/public-2/sei...trument/summary
Seems like that experiment wants no regolith to get best vibration, but they're confident that
they can work with regolith.

The heat probe is designed to burrow through up to 5 meters of regolith, then (perhaps) hits bedrock.
https://www.seis-insight.eu/en/public-2/the...her-instruments
That experiment WANTS a deep regolith to get heat flow numbers.

Thanks!
Those are great articles - they really clarify a lot of issues I had been wondering about!

In that context, I found this publication helpful (https://elib.dlr.de/121308/1/Spohn_et_al-20...nce_Reviews.pdf). I also wondered how well the mole would cope with any buried rocks.

They say:

I found and purchased ($0.99) the iPhone app "Mars-Clock" that has all this info. in detail for the current landed probes on Mars including InSight. It can be found on the app store -- be sure to look carefully as there are other similar apps available that (as of a few days ago) did not have info. for InSight. I'm not sure if there is anything on the web with this detailed info. or for other mobile platforms.

You know, after reading that, deploying the seismometer first and then moving the probe around as a "thumper" to create a 3d
map of the underground location of the big rocks you need to avoid, isn't such a crazy idea after all...

We have never drilled more than a scratch under the surface. This is completely uncharted territory. Will the material in the well get analyzed?

Exciting stuff

nope. the mission is about seismology and heat balance, not about chemistry

Since I didn't see a clock, I put this together. Should be within a second or so until the next leap second.
https://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~lemmon/mars-nsyt.html

But trenching has been done.

In my post on the second page of this thread I showed part of a HiRISE image in the area east of the target point, where I expected the lander to be. I have since learned that we are in fact west of the target, where the surface is a lot smoother than shown in that image. Can't be more specific now.

Phil

yeah but not 16 feet.

That's pretty deep, we might get some surprises

I was actually wondering if the system was designed to be able to "reel-in" the mole by its scientific tether to try a different location in case it were to meet criteria for mission failure by hitting an unmovable rock at too shallow a depth, but cant seem to find any mention of that, and seems highly risky anyways.. but on the other hand, such seismic imaging should also be possible by tapping the ground at strategic points with the deployment arm's bucket, or perhaps most safely by simply dropping scoops of regolith, no?

[deleted]

Whoa!

Keep in mind that the landing ellipse was several CTX swaths wide, so missing wouldn't be that surprising.

Insight breaks solar power producing record on Mars.

Mars New Home a Large Sandbox