From that news release:No word on whether that means pushing outwards as atomoid suggested.

News releases by NASA/JPL and DLR

Both relate to pressing the side of the scoop against the mole, pinning it to the wall of its pit, to attempt to gain friction and allow the heat probe to continue its journey. Besides pinning, the team is also testing a technique to use the scoop in the way it was originally intended to work: scraping soil into the hole rather than trying to compress it.

Good to see all hope is not over, good luck Mole !

35cm depth, duricrust up to 10cm thick, 5cm above surface.... doesn't make it a given that even if the rub gets it to 40cm depth that the arm won't need to bury it to help it get deeper. Hopefully it does become conclusive that lack of friction/leverage is the issue, and that there's no roadblock.

A short hammering session for the mole is scheduled for October 8. Updated DLR Blog link
#savethemole

Since the arm is only able to 'hold position' and not 'push', I had assumed the mole would be 'pinned' to the side of the hole then the arm locked with little if any tension when the hammering commences, in which case i would suspect that little torque to be released early in the hammering process as the sands reorganize to accommodate the mole's new vector, however, unless they are indeed able to set up a high-torque configuration with the arm, it seems they may instead be setting up the timing of the arm movement to coincide along with the hammering and as a result the arm is going to keep tension throughout the pinning operation, enough tension that they are concerned about the magnitude of such forces:

Some movement on 308 - our first direct look at hammering on Mars:
Click to view attachment
This spans about 5 minutes.

Down a little and precessed a little?

How about move the scoop away from it and just see what it does? That is one step that appears to have been skipped after they moved the support structure.

Here's a stabilised GIF from @AstroMelina


Click to view attachment

Seems like there are some hopefully good advances in the HP3 hammering. This animation shows the movement of the mole as of yesterday, 12th of October, during six minutes.

Click to view attachment

Fun video. ~3 cm down, 3 m to go?

Wonderful new!

Great animation!

Sorry if I am posting this in the wrong spot, but I have a question about the Seismometer.

MRO images have shown a lot of fairly large craters appearing over the years and I was wondering if the Insight seismometer has picked up any meteorite impact signals yet? My understanding is that the largest signal measured so far is around a magnitude of 3.5. I am surprised that about a year has gone by without any significant meteor impact signals. I thought the seismometer was so sensitive that it would detect at least a few meteor impacts by now?

Confirming what you haven't found, both the JPL and InSight teams' recent releases seem to avoid speculating on the causes of the mag3+ quakes. I'm going to speculate that they're saving their conclusions of that nature for future releases that coincide with future publications. They have been good with keeping the public apprised so far.

That said, awesome progress with the Mole!

Yes, great to see movement in the right direction.
What will happened when the mole gets too low in the ground for the scoop to press against it anymore? Hopefully that will be enough for it to get traction and finish digging on its own?

That is the proverbial 64 million dollar question. My guess is the mole will be fine and dig deep .

Its good to have confirmation that the mole hadn't pinned itself into a crevice in a buried rock, so onward! (er, downward!)
Here is a full resolution crop GIF (5fps) of ten frames sol311
Click to view attachment
Interesting to see the mole twisting on its way down, im sure thats conforming to test results and presumably may alternate and cancel out as the tether trails along behind the descending mole, and as the borehole fills with soil behind it the tether will thread through along a perhaps careening path much like a hot knife through butter without imparting too much drag, i'd assume that infalling regolith should tend to work to prevent further drag-inducing twists once it gets a dozen or more cm below the surface.. thats novice white-knuckle speculation of course!

I believe that the twisting/rotating motion of the mole is because it is in contact with the scoop at an angle. If the angle of contact was square the motion would be zero. The rotation of the mole would also be zero if it weren't in contact with scoop - so this is likely a temporary situation.

Something setting in the west or SW on sol 314 as viewed from the ICC:
Click to view attachment
Phobos would set in the east, so it's probably Deimos but might be a very bright star or planet - I haven't checked what was in the sky then.
Edit: looking back at the 254 and 258 ICC night sequences shows Deimos again setting which I missed at the time.

Sirius. Neither moon enters ICC field of view.

Thanks, Deimos. Makes sense: centre of field of view very roughly 10 deg west of south, the right edge of ICC would be crudely 75 deg west of south, so unable to see the equatorial moons from 4.5 deg N latitude.

News release from NASA/JPL Link "Mars InSight's 'Mole' Is Moving Again"

todays (sol315) progress full res crop 5fps
Click to view attachment

it's no longer a mole, they should consider renaming it "the corkscrew"

Tilman's logbook at DLR updated:
https://www.dlr.de/blogs/en/all-blog-posts/...on-logbook.aspx

If the mole is able to rotate on its own without contact from the scoop. Then it's simply a result of rotary components being used internally. Not too unlike ball-point pen retraction/ratchet mechanism that is able to recoil.

I'd thought the rotation was due to some complex interaction between the mole, scoop and soil constraints at gravity angle, but indeed its as if its roller-cam setup was inspired by a ball point pen clicker, it seems like it could impart CCW rotation when the roller edges over the 'cliff'. This site has many papers on the HP3 hammering mechanism.

Sol 318 advancement look promising.

Click to view attachment

The mole doesn't seem to be rotating in this hammering session. Maybe it was spinning away from an obstacle, or it is in firm contact with the soil now which has created more friction?

Does the Tether Unit have to be moved back above mole?

"The team are indeed considering replacing the support structure so the science tether will have a direct line down into the soil from the TLM, rather than having to do a dog-leg. Agreement to do that, and agreement on exactly how it would be done are being actively pursued."
(Source a member of the team)

Tom Hoffman did a presentation at the Mars Society Convention (again). Space.com has pullquoted it somewhat, but the replay isn't yet on YouTube.
https://www.space.com/mars-soil-weird-nasa-...ght-lander.html

while we wait for next steps, here are cherry-picked frames from the full sequence cropped and resampled to squeeze into a 3mb gif file 10fps
Click to view attachment

On sol 322 the scoop was moved sideways slightly, away from the mole, and then pushed down to touch the mole again at a lower position, to keep contact with the mole as it descends.

Phil

Mole: the legend continues, episode:322
Click to view attachment

New post at the DLR blog:

https://www.dlr.de/blogs/en/all-blog-posts/...aspx/ressort-2/

The new images do not look good.

Ouch.

Yikes. Rapidly backwards.

An image from 12:30 or so shows the tether as a bit blurry, like it was moving when the image was taken. Very strange! What will SEIS have recorded...

What the bleep happened ?

is it gonna fall over when they lift the scoop....

Looks quite precarious.. indeed..

Surprised the mole design doesn't include angled prongs/barbs that only allow forward movement. Also surprised at the high-frequency the mole hammers with - all that does is encourage material to settle at the bottom. At least it did in my toy sandbox when I was a kid.

Digging here on Earth involves pushing a lot of mass at low frequency to break things, it's common sense. High frequency movements just pack things, and the mole is packing itself backwards it seems.

I also hope they're considering the angle of the bucket/scoop. Aligning it one way will promote downward movement, another way will cause it back out.

Well.. they know what they're doing.

I was so excited and now this happened.

I'm very worried.

First sentence of the most recent DLR blog post:

"On sol 318 we had the Mole execute 150 more strokes that brought the back-cap of the Mole so close to the scoop that continuing with pinning was no longer considered safe."

So maybe they have accidentally snagged the back-cap while moving the scoop? I doubt that the mole could jump like that under its own power.

I think the scoop was already moved off the mole and into to the position where it presses on the adjacent surface. It sounded like this round of digging was hopefully to make the mole disappear beneath the surface at which point they were going to pause and move the support structure back. That might helped to prevent this, but I don't know because this is weird.

I'm also very worried.

The most recent images show it has come out even further, and has started to tip over some more. The ground also appears more compressed. Is it possible we were somewhat filling the hole, and the mole was bouncing off the dirt as it filled in?

Has anyone seen any sort of official statement from the program yet? Hopefully they have derived at least a tentative explanation for this bizarre occurrence.

Can't imagine that this ever happened during testing. If nothing else, this is a reminder that a- testing can never encompass all possible contingencies and b- there isn't anything easy about Mars.

EDIT: New from the InSight Twitter/FB feed:

"Mars continues to surprise us. While digging this weekend the mole backed about halfway out of the ground. Preliminary assessment points to the unexpected soil properties as the main reason.

One possibility that has been observed in testing on Earth is that soil could fall in front of the mole’s tip as it rebounds, gradually filling the hole in front of it as the mole backs out. My team continues to look over the data and will have a plan in the next few days."

That's a result of high-frequency drilling. You don't see jackhammers working at such rates.