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Robot 'Mole' on Mars Begins Digging Into Red Planet This Week
By Meghan Bartels 6 hours ago
The InSight captured this shot of its heat probe on the Martian surface on Feb. 13.(Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech/DLR)
Update, 5:20 p.m. EST: The mole's deployment has been delayed by two days because the commands didn't reach InSight in time, according to a statement from the German space agency, a collaborator on the mission.
The first-ever interplanetary "mole" is about to start burrowing into the Martian surface — but this mole is purely mechanical, and it would flounder on any other world.
The mole is one of the key instruments incorporated in NASA's InSight mission, which landed on Mars in November and will begin its work in earnest tonight (Feb. 26). It will be the first robotic instrument to measure how heat flows through another planet — a crucial measurement that will help scientists understand how Mars got to be the way it is.
"Unlike, say, a camera, which we've flown hundreds on various missions, there hasn't been anything like the mole before," Troy Hudson, an instrument systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), told Space.com.
More:
https://www.space.com/mars-mole-insight-heat-probe-begins-science.html