I think your inferences are unwarranted. It was always known that wind noise was the limiting factor for signal detection, and the increase of wind on a seasonal basis would therefore obviously decrease the number of detections. That doesn't tell us anything about whether the WTS is working at the expected efficiency. If you take a look at figure SI1.1 in The Seismicity of Mars (Supplemental) and compare it to the figures in Noise Model of SEIS, they seem pretty close to me.

All of the images through sol 480 are released through PDS at https://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/data/nsyt/insight_cameras/ in multiple forms (including ones where spacecraft structure is helpfully masked out) but even though their SIS describes multiple flavors of mosaics, 3D grids, etc, I don't think any of those have been released yet; at least I couldn't find them.

Thanks, Mike. I'm in there after every release but not finding what i want yet. There were some mosaics in earlier releases but not now, it seems. Don't know why.

In other news, the arm has been raised on sol 577:

https://mars.nasa.gov/insight-raw-images/su...0101_0095M_.JPG


Phil

Huh... the pit seems almost completely filled with soil already (and it really looks very powdery!). There might not be that much filling in for the scoop to do.

Increasing Dust on the Lander's Solar Array: Sol 10, 227 and today (sol 578)
Click to view attachment

EDIT:
Selected Solar Array output from the Mission Managers Reports posted in the InSight Analysts Notebook (PDS)

Sol 1: >3000 Whr
Sol 103: ~2800 Whr/sol
Sol 225-232: ~1950Whr/sol (when the middle image was obtained)
Sol 301-308: ~1900 Whr/sol
Sol 376-402 ~2100 Whr/sol
Sol 478-484: ~2100 Whr/sol
No further data in the PDS

I think we need a friendly

I had a go at generating another structure from motion of the workspace after the Sol 577 Workspace Survey

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/insight-sol...ae1d41096e31e5c

Click to view attachment

I think it is important to phrase remarks like this carefully. I believe the WTS is doing its job effectively (viz, eliminating wind forces and temperature changes on the instrument)

It is a separate question (1) whether atmosphere-generated disturbances communicated by other pathways are dominating the noise background, and a separate question still (2) whether that noise is confounding the ability to detect Mars seismicity, and a separate question still (3) whether aspirations to determine aspects of Mars' interior are feasible on a lander like InSight.

I wrote a paper (titled mostly about Venus, to avoid being too confrontational during the 2011/2012 Discovery competition, when I was involved in the Titan Mare Explorer) that discusses the prominent role of wind and lander noise. Apollo 11 saw lander noise, even in the absence of an atmosphere, and even with the seismometer many meters from the lander (effect was less, but not zero, on subsequent landers whose crews were able to emplace the seismometers further away)
Even if you buried the seismometer a meter or two down, if you are within some meters of a big 'wind noise antenna', there will be a contribution. (Seismic observatories are sited away from trees and buildings for this reason, and ideally tens of meters down in bedrock. The most useful literature I came across on this problem a decade ago is in nonideal locations where seismic instrumentation is used for treaty verification and perimeter security....)

On InSight a dominant noise is wind loads on the lander, communicated through the feet and the regolith to the instrument. That's physics, that's not a failure of the WTS. There is a practical limit on how far away it can be placed, due to finite arm length. A recent paper (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019JE006353) shows that basically putting the instrument on the ground a meter or so away knocks the noise down by an order of magnitude, and putting the wind shield on knocks it down by another OOM. So WTS works.

The big issue (2) is basically that Mars has turned out to be seismically quiet (which to some extent we knew from Viking anyway....but that's another story) If there were more activity, the wind noise, not too different from expectations I think, would not be a problem, we would have detected the events.

On (3) it's probably still too early to say. One single large event would tell us an awful lot. Maybe it will happen tomorrow.

.

Thank you very much, sir,

My inexperience is the only excuse for this clumsy wording (or even inaccurate according to your arguments)

This detailed answer can certainly clarify a little my ideas on some of the interferences complicating the analysis of SEIS data.

If i may, I will set my alarm to ring early in the morning to not miss anything of this event, hoping that the vibrations of the bell do not disturb the SEIS sensors.

I'm no geologist, but I'm somewhat handy around statistics, and it seems to me that if wind is often a troubling source of noise, but at other times it is not, the loss of science is not proportional to the amount of time that wind prevents the detection of a quake.

Small quakes are likely relatively continuous in distribution, and if we record those for a fraction of the mission time, we still learn a lot.

And if there is a massive quake, it would likely exceed the wind noise problem.

And if there isn't, we learn from that, too.

The goal here isn't to have a flawless, uninterrupted record of martian seismicity. That would be ideal, but it isn't a requirement.

On Apollo, did they fly the third stages into the Moon to test the seismometers? Anything missions beginning with a Mars gravity assist soon? Too much of a Planetary Protection hurdle to jump?

You intentionally target missions away from Mars so the upper stage has a tiny chance of - over 50 years - hitting the planet. You then use TCM 1 to tidy that up and put the spacecraft on a trajectory to intercept the planet. Upper stages are just not cleared for planetary protection.

On the airless Moon, the energy of an artificial impactor would be perfectly known. On Mars, you'd also have to reckon with the loss of energy during entry be something of an unknown, and with an elongated object whose attitude is not controlled, that might be quite an uncontrolled variable.

For Curiosity, the cruise stage and several balance masses struck the surface, and presumably it will be the same for Percy. So impacts are likely but may be too far away to be detected.

Edit: China's landing site is in Utopia Planitia, closer to InSight than Jezero is. I don't know if it will drop hardware during the descent, and I hope it will not crash but there could be a signal from that landing attempt.

Phil

Some night-time images (6:30 pm local time) were taken on sol 580. I don't know why. This is the set of images merged and brightened a bit.

Phil

Click to view attachment

From the recent mission update from JPL:

It does not look like a full blown attempt to spot meteors as there's only a small amount of sky in the frame, unless they dont want to point the camera at the sky during the dusty season, but it could have been an exercise to calibrate the camera for use at night? (akin to a noise check?)

Then & Now: About 17 months between these frames of a section of InSight's deck (both after deployment of the WTS and HP3). 2 processed IDC images from Sols 85 and 584. I've included an animated GIF and a side-by-side comparison. Besides the grapple, the most obvious changes are the dust levels, as well as the softened shadows (probably as a result of the increased levels of suspended dust in the atmosphere). Also note what appears to be a little relaxation in the HP3 engineering tether that stretches across the deck.
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

This is a night IDC image from sol 593 taken about 10 pm or 22 hours local lander time (here, denoised to some extent and contrast stretched). Presumably this is a meteor search image, or at least a test of meteor imaging - there was only one frame. I was interested to observe that there is a faint dark patch, indicated with arrows at right, corresponding to the end of the arm as seen in every IDC image. Is it an artifact, a persistent image burned into the chip? Or is it a silhouette of the arm against a scene which is not totally dark, lit by stars, scattered sunlight even this far from the terminator, light reflected off Phobos or even an aurora? If it was sky brightness I might expect to see the horizon but I don't see it, though probably it's well above the horizon. (EDIT: yes, must be pointing high, the daytime images show that)

Click to view attachment

Phil

The effect was noted in the Banfield et al. Nature paper. It is not burn-in; a test looking at the ground at night was done, and the image must be of the sky to detect it. Later images show that when Phobos is up, the brightness can about double. I don't believe the explanation in the paper (umm, I wrote it); but it seems to me to be somewhat too bright for star light, and way too bright for anything else. So maybe star light?

Here on Earth the night sky brightness is dominated by airglow, at dark sites. Recently there was a measurement from TGO of martian airglow. I don't know how its brightness compares to Earth's, but perhaps this adds significantly to the somewhat low starlight contribution?

BTW, great catch, Phil!

After a few weeks of performing other activities the robotic arm returned to the saving the mole campaign earlier today on Mars (sol 598). Here's a processed IDC frame that shows some back-filling of the shallow pit around the mole. I'm presuming that additional images are in the pipeline and we may have a better picture once they are all down, but I thought I'd share this one now.
Click to view attachment
#savethemole

A number of IDC images were acquired on Sol 599 from different positions around the pit, I presume this was to make a 3D model of the partially filled pit prior to deciding the next step(s)

I used MS ICE to assemble the frames together to make a mosaic that I cropped to remove the arm(s), as this provides a slightly better view of the scrape, the partially filled pit and the rest of the ground around the pit in case they decide to scrape in some more material before proceeding.

Click to view attachment

#SaveTheMole

Cross-eyed view:
Click to view attachment
and anaglyph:
Click to view attachment

DLR Mission Logbook entry updated (10 August 2020)

https://www.dlr.de/blogs/en/desktopdefault....9577_read-1144/

So they didn't intend to bury it, but nonetheless will give it one more push.

Thermal conductance increased, which means better contact with regolith. Encouraging.

And that extra push just happened - pushing down with a tilted scoop rather than the blade or the flat of the scoop, as I understand it. Looks like it went in a bit more. maybe a couple of centimetres. We might see more burial now and pushing on the soil again.

Phil

From the time of Insight's landing till now, the mole's digging has yielded a net average downward velocity of about 3 nanometers per second.

Eagerly awaiting a millionfold or thereabouts acceleration!

Bonjour,

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-engin...weather-sensors

Data transmission problem from the weather station of Insight. This must not be without consequences on the operation of SEIS.

The situation, under investigation, does not seem too worrying.

Twitter has some animations of the recent arm / mole activity
https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1299...3984438272?s=20

Oh! Wow!

More activity on sol 632, including flexing of the cable which suggests to me there was some downward movement. The cable left a curving imprint in the surface where it had been in contact recently.

Phil

Here's a roughly assembled MP4 timelapse I created using the available 16 frames hosted on streamable Link1 and on Imgur Link2

Here's another link to a set of three GIFs at varying zoom levels, created by Richard Horton and shared on Reddit Link3

Hmm I think it's rotating towards the horizontal ?

Does look like it might have pulled a few mm more cable into the hole. But I think it is the weight of the scoop pressing on and repositioning the cable. I doubt the probe could be going more horizontal.

I've not seen an official news release, but the weather page for InSight is once again providing weather data, so it looks like this issue may have been resolved

This page Link has weather data for September 7 and 8.

Sol 645 animated GIF of the latest HP3 hammer session.
IDC camera using the 16 frames with activity, reduced to 512x512 to upload. Link to full size (17 frame) MP4 version on Imgur.
We can see a little movement of the tether and scoop, but with little apparent progress!
Click to view attachment
#SaveTheMole

sol 645... another 24 sols and we will have been on Mars for a full Mars year.

I think the tether moves towards the hole about as much as the scoop moves down (looking at images stabilized to the surface, not the arm). That seems like good news to me.

Phil

I'm focusing on the left edge of the screen, where the tether is nearly in line of sight with a couple of pebbles. It looks like it is initially arched upwards, then flattens as, apparently, the mole/arm pull the slack out of it. Then a sort of wave of motion causes it to arch again, and pull down again.

15:25 Arched upwards.
15:29 Pulls downward, flattens.
15:35: Arches upwards again.

The question is, does the second motion indicate a slack from the mole/arm, or an uncoiling in the slack of the tether nearer the lander? It looks to me like in the last 3 or so frames, the tether is still moving towards the mole. I'm optimistic.

I'm looking at the wiring inside the teather. In some images it's easy to see.
Otherwise, in most cases some enhancement and excessive sharpening resolves the wiring clear enough
Click to view attachment
to see a clear y-shape of the wires:
Click to view attachment

But it's still hard to identify evident progress within the latest image series.

InSight Lander: Sol 645 - Updated timelapse (MP4 clip @ 1024x1024) of the HP3 hammering session, now using 31 frames (my previous post used the available 16 frames)
MP4 Link
Still frame from the animation.
Click to view attachment

Super animations.

Is there a measurement mark on the tether to (visually) see how far it has sunk?

John

There's a gray-coded series of marks on the science tether that's read by an optical sensor inside the support structure, and there's also a regularly-spaced series of marks on the tether (See figure 2 in https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2019/pdf/1344.pdf ) but I'm not sure any of this can be seen in the available imagery.

In some of the images, the marks can be seen pretty well:
Click to view attachment
(Sol 633)

Click to view attachment
(Sol 646)

Many thanks to you both - mcaplinger and Gerald.

John

Welcome!
For convenience, here a blink between roughly registered images of Sols 633 and 646:
Click to view attachment

One of the contributors to the InSight Reddit page just compiled this YouTube video documenting the trials and tribulations the mole
LINK

There is some apparent interaction between the scoop / mole since the last hammer session on Sol 645?

On Sol 645 there was a long hammer session (I already shared the animation here) however there appears to have been some small downward movement of the scoop in the daily IDC images returned by the lander.

I've assembled a simple cropped GIF using frames from Sols 645 (last in the session), 646, 647, 649 & 651.

This apparent downward movement could be due to mid week hammer sessions (but that would be out of the ordinary) or possibly natural harmonics in the lander caused by the seasonal winds inducing vibrations by interaction with the solar cells?

Click to view attachment

Spotted by a contributor on the Sub-Reddit for InSight who shared this zooned IDC clip Looking at the zoomed clip it's hard to be sure, but there appears to be some minor sand grain movements on the scoop, I'm not sure if they are caused by shadow / lighting, or are hammer sessions.

It's looking to me like they'd analyse each single hit of the hammer. Just a more or less educated speculation.

There is definitely progress between Sol 645 and Sol 651 in terms of the objects we can see. FWIW, the frames are not aligned precisely and appear, possibly, to be aligned on the tether rather than the ground, but I'm blinking 645 and 651 in Photoshop now with precise alignment and we can see the tether moving the right way as the scoop lowers. The movement of the tether appears to be about equal to the width of one of the dark squares on it – something like 4mm? The pebbles in front of the scoop move upwards as the scoop moves downwards.

Reading team blog posts from the past, I note that one of the mysteries for them was the way that quite a bit of the soil they scooped in simply seems to disappear, presumably filling in small voids in the duricrust/soil below the scoop as they compact it. So it is possible that downward motion could occur now without any hammering – if the pressure of the scoop alone is sufficient to compact the soil. Since we're seeing a movement of less than 1mm/day, whatever happened is quite small, but at least it's in the right direction.

I apologise if this is a silly question, but it looks like there's more pressure on the cable than was imagined when the whole thing was designed. With the hole being (partially?) filled plus the pressure from the arm, is there any risk of damage to the mole/cable interface? I suppose I imagine a sort of issue where the cable is pulled on too much during mole drilling and eventually tears.