Podcasters: Ralph Wilkins
Title : Awesome Astronomy: Farewell NASA’s InSight Mission
Organization: Awesome Astronomy
Link : www.awesomeastronomy.com; A gallery of event images can be found here: https://www.space-park.co.uk/galleries/bpsc2024/
Description: From Dec 30, 2022.
We say farewell to NASA’s Insight mission on Mars. This lander spent 6 years on the Martian surface examining the interior of the planet. It discovered that Mars is not geologically dead as we previously thought. It discovered that Mars has a larger core than we thought, its magnetic field was stronger than we thought and the crust is thinner. And in typical NASA fashion, it made us all sad to think of the little fella dying in the cold Martian dirt. The heartless swines!
Damien Phillips, John Wildridge and Dustin Ruoff produce.
Bio: Awesome Astronomy explores the frontiers of science, space and our evolving understanding of the universe.
Join Paul & Jeni for informative and fun astronomy programmes dedicated to space and astronomy news and monthly podcast extras covering hot topics and special interviews in the world of science and astronomy.
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Transcript:
00:00:00 Intro
It the 365 days of astronomy podcast.
00:00:04
Coming in three.
00:00:06
1.
00:00:20 Ralph
Another NASA spacecraft dies and says goodbye to the world in Nasas own inimitable way, making us all feel sorry for the little critter, as though it’s not just a machine with no feelings at all.
00:00:34 Ralph
Damn you, NASA.
00:00:35 Ralph
You get me every time with this.
00:00:42 Ralph
So NASA’s insight Lander on Mars has come to an end.
00:00:46 Ralph
Not because of any mechanical failure, but because the solar panels are getting so deep in Mars dust that they just can’t generate enough power to keep it going.
00:00:58 Ralph
Knowing if you’ve seen the movie The Martian or tried to watch your Mars Lander descend slowly under a parachute, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that Mars doesn’t have any weather or atmosphere to kick up dust.
00:01:13 Ralph
But despite having only 1% as thick an atmosphere as earth, there’s still quite a lot of weather and a lot of Mars dust does get shifted around and coats all the Rovers and wonders that go there.
00:01:27 Ralph
You can even see here videos taken of the dust devils that happen regularly on the Martian surface.
00:01:33 Ralph
First, this is one of the reasons that NASA often uses nuclear power sources rather than relying on solar panels that will eventually get too grubby to provide power.
00:01:45 Ralph
And if you.
00:01:45 Ralph
Wondering why Mars’s atmosphere is so thin.
00:01:50 Ralph
Well, that’s because the planet is smaller than Earth, so its core cooled down faster, which meant it lost the magnetic field that protected the atmosphere from the blast of the solar.
00:02:01 Ralph
Wind, once the course started to solidify, the atmosphere began being lost to space. Just as hours will when our core melts.
00:02:09 Ralph
But luckily, depending on your perspective, the sun will swell up and scorch all life on earth long before the core cools in about four or 5 billion years.
00:02:19 Ralph
Plenty of time to finish the box set.
00:02:22 Ralph
So this Lambda naughty inside probe travelled to Mars on Ann Atlas 5 Rocket landing on the Red Planet in November 2018.
00:02:31 Ralph
It’s lasted an impressive 4.
00:02:33 Ralph
Years, all that time gathering the information on the interior of Mars. This wasn’t 1 of masses, glamorous missions, not a Rover like curiosity or perseverance, but it landed in one place with a suite of scientific instruments to gather data.
00:02:51 Ralph
A side mounted to measure the vibrations caused by Mars internal activity to reveal the properties of the crust, the mantle and the core.
00:03:00 Ralph
A heat flow sensor called HP3 to boil down and take Mars temperature to.
00:03:06 Ralph
How much heat is flowing out of the deep interior of the planter and therefore how quickly it’s cooled down?
00:03:14 Ralph
A radio science instrument to measure the wobble of Mars and North Pole as the sun pushes and pulls on it in its orbit.
00:03:20 Ralph
This was to provide clues on the size and composition of Mars as metallic core.
00:03:25 Ralph
Then it has a temperature sensor, a wind sensor, a super precise atmospheric pressure sensor, an arm to deploy some of the sensors, and a couple of cameras to help the NASA mission team.
00:03:37 Ralph
Deploy them without causing any damage to the sensors or the Lander itself.
00:03:44 Ralph
So this was a pure science mission, lacking grammar, but more than making up for that would be insights. It gave us about the physical history and evolution of all the rocky planets in the solar system. Mercury.
00:04:00 Ralph
Venus, Earth and Mars, as well as the other solar systems moons, just with its investigations on Mars.
00:04:08 Ralph
So now we know that Mars has infrequent Mars quakes, not a given as Mars was thought to be geologically dead.
00:04:17 Ralph
1300 quakes were detected by.
00:04:19 Ralph
Very mild, except for one magnitude 5 quake last year. It even detected a magnitude 4 quake caused by a meteorite impact.
00:04:40 Ralph
And we know where on bars gets the most, which can be kind of useful for when we send people. We now know for certain that Mars had a magnetic field like Earth.
00:04:51 Ralph
Lost that magnetic.
00:04:52 Ralph
4 billion years ago, when the core cooled and solidified.
00:04:56 Ralph
But there are ghosts of that magnetism in the Martian.
00:05:00 Ralph
The insight was able to detect and that magnetism was 10 times greater than all the Mars orbiters had measured before, which suggest the original magnetic field was probably much stronger than we thought.
00:05:13 Ralph
Something that makes more sense in light of.
00:05:17 Ralph
Surprising discovery that Mars had a much larger core than expected.
00:05:22 Ralph
More than half the diameter of the whole planet, that meant that the planets crust is thinner than we.
00:05:28 Ralph
Thought too.
00:05:29 Ralph
Just 25 to 40 kilometers deep.
00:05:32 Ralph
But while.
00:05:33 Ralph
Us all this rich data. It slowly began to accumulate dust on its solar panels. As you can see here.
00:05:40 Ralph
The power it could get from the sun gradually dropped, and it’s also worth mentioning that Mars is 1 1/2 times further from the Sun than Earth, but less than half as much sunlight falls on it.
00:05:52 Ralph
So the.
00:05:54 Ralph
Solar panels were already at a disadvantage when they were fresh and clean as the power dropped so much that it couldn’t function in typical fashion, Massa sent an anthropomorphic tweet from the robotic Lander, saying my powers really low.
00:06:09 Ralph
This may be the last image I can send.
00:06:12 Ralph
Don’t worry about me though. My time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will.
00:06:20 Ralph
But I’ll be signing off here soon.
00:06:22 Ralph
Thanks for staying with me, tearing up every time with this emotional nonsense over a machine.
00:06:31 Ralph
But true to its word, the Insight Lander had sent its last image, and NASA declared it dead two days later, on the 21st of December.
00:06:39 Ralph
But don’t worry too.
00:06:41 Ralph
It gathered incredible amounts of data that help us to understand the planets composition, geology and evolution.
00:06:50 Ralph
And we still have.
00:06:51 Ralph
7 spacecraft orbiting.
00:06:53 Ralph
3 Rovers on the.
00:06:55 Ralph
A live search in Rover ready to go when the European Space Agency can find.
00:07:00 Ralph
A landing system that doesn’t involve Russia, and we have three more Mars Rovers.
00:07:06 Ralph
Stage but go and check out these videos on human exploration on Mars to find out why it’s so damn difficult to send people there.
00:07:16 Ralph
You listening to the 355 days of astronomy podcast?
00:07:27
Cool.
00:07:28 Richard Drum
I.
00:07:34 Richard Drum
The 365 days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute.
00:07:41 Richard Drum
Audio post production is by me, Richard drum.
00:07:44 Richard Drum
Project management is by Avivah Yamani and hosting is donated by libsyn.com.
00:07:50 Richard Drum
This content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution.
00:07:54 Richard Drum
Non commercial 4.0 international license.
00:07:58 Richard Drum
Please share what you love, but don’t sell what’s free. This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you.
00:08:01
I.
00:08:06 Richard Drum
Please consider supporting our show on patreon.com/cosmo Quest X and get access to bonus content.
00:08:15 Richard Drum
Without your passion and contribution.
00:08:17 Richard Drum
We won’t be able to share the stories and inspire the worlds. We invite you to join our community of storytellers and share your voice with the listeners world.
00:08:27 Richard Drum
Why? As we wrap up today’s episode, we’re looking forward to unraveling more stories from the universe with every new discovery from ground based and space based observatories at each milestone and space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it.
00:08:46 Richard Drum
Until next time, let the stars guide your curiosity.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
=====================
The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Planetary Science Institute. Audio post production by me, Richard Drumm, project management by Avivah Yamani, and hosting donated by libsyn.com. This content is released under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Please share what you love but don’t sell what’s free.
This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you! Please consider supporting our show on Patreon.com/CosmoQuestX and get access to bonus content. Without your passion and contribution, we won’t be able to share the stories and inspire the worlds. We invite you to join our community of storytellers and share your voice with listeners worldwide.
As we wrap up today’s episode, we are looking forward to unravel more stories from the Universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories, and each milestone in space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it.
Until next time let the stars guide your curiosity!