Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
The next spacecraft set to land on Mars is bringing its own communications team.
InSight, a lander scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet on November 26, is accompanied by a pair of briefcase-sized spacecraft that will send details of the landing to Earth in almost real time.The twin craft on this mission are CubeSats — tiny, inexpensive satellites that are easy to build and launch. Called Mars Cube One, or MarCO for short, they will fly past Mars as InSight lands, becoming the smallest spacecraft ever to be entrusted with a task as crucial as relaying landing information for a mission. Now nearing Mars, they are also already the first CubeSats to make it so far from Earth. If all goes well with InSight’s landing, future Mars missions could also be equipped with their own single-use comms team.
“A future where landers and rovers brought their own communications systems for landing, that would be fantastic,” says engineer Joel Krajewski of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and MarCO’s program manager.
InSight — short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — will carry the first seismometer to Mars (SN: 5/26/18, p. 13). After touching down in a wide, flat plain called Elysium Planitia near Mars’ equator, the lander will sit perfectly still to listen to seismic waves and measure how heat flows through the Red Planet’s interior.
The results will help scientists understand how Mars, and perhaps other rocky planets like Earth, formed around 4.5 billion years ago.It will be only 6½ minutes between when InSight enters the Martian atmosphere, at a speed of nearly 1,000 meters per second, to the moment its legs touch the ground. The spacecraft will use a parachute and rockets aimed at the ground to slow to about 2.4 meters per second as…
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