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A ROBOTIC GEOLOGIST armed with a hammer and quake monitor rocketed toward Mars aiming to land on the red planet and explore its mysterious insides.
In a twist, NASA launched the Mars InSight lander from California rather than Florida’s Cape Canaveral. It was the first interplanetary mission ever to depart from the West Coast, drawing pre-dawn crowds to Vandenberg Air Force Base and rocket watchers down the California coast into Baja.
The spacecraft will take more than six months to get to Mars and start its unprecedented geologic excavations, traveling 300 million miles to get there.
InSight will dig deeper into Mars than ever before — nearly 16 feet — to take the planet’s temperature. It will also attempt to make the first measurements of marsquakes, using a high-tech seismometer placed directly on the Martian surface.
Also aboard the Atlas V rocket: a pair of mini satellites, or CubeSats, meant to trail InSight all the way to Mars in a first-of-its-kind technology demonstration.
The $1 billion mission involves scientists from the US, France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
“I can’t describe to you in words how very excited I am … to go off to Mars,” said project manager Tom Hoffman from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “It’s going to be awesome.”
NASA hasn’t put a spacecraft down on Mars since the Curiosity rover in 2012. The U.S. is the only country to successfully land and operate a spacecraft at Mars. It’s tough, complicated stuff. Only about 40% of all missions to Mars from all countries — orbiters and landers alike — have proven successful over the decades.
If all goes well, the three-legged InSight will descend by parachute and engine firings onto a flat equatorial region of Mars — believed to be free of big, potentially dangerous rocks — on Nov. 26. Once down, it will stay put, using a mechanical arm to place the science instruments on the surface.
“This mission will probe the interior of another terrestrial planet, giving us an idea of the size of the core, the mantle, the crust and our ability then to compare that with the Earth,” said NASA’s chief scientist Jim Green. “This is of fundamental importance to understand the origin of our solar system and how it became the way it is today.”
InSight’s principal scientist, Bruce Banerdt of JPL, said Mars is ideal for learning how the rocky planets of our solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. Unlike our active Earth, Mars hasn’t been transformed by plate tectonics and other processes, he noted.
Wow….it’ll be like clay pigeon shooting with a free mystery prize “)
Old news.. really old news… They spoke about this over a month ago
Welcome to the journal -
It’s news to me, and it’s a column so have a little shush.
It’s a column, not a news item. It even mentions that it was announced a month ago.
It was news on the journal a month ago.
Yeah sure, it’ll obviously be very cost effective to send copies of the new Dan Brown to Leitrim using this delicate drone thingy which kids definetly won’t throw rocks at! Thank you Journal for this glimpse into the future!
I can’t see these ever working in their current format. In the past few weeks I’ve had books and other packages delivered that I’d ordered from the net, if I’d been relying on drones to deliver the same items they’d be somewhere over Eastern Europe by now. While technology is a wonderful thing, sometimes low tech is the best method for a given task. Keep it simple.
I wish they wouldn’t keep droning on and on about it.
Considering trains first got up and running in the early 1800′s, and we can’t even get ours working properly in 2014, not to mention ‘newer’ advances such as 3G and Wi-fi, i don’t think the Irish have anything to be overly concerned regarding drones, our children’s children will have passed on by the time they utilise them properly here
The future of suicide bombing
Also great for drug dealers
The Muricans already use drones to carry out cowardly attacks
How would that be like suicide bombing?
I’m scared !
You’re ok. You live in Antarctica.
Unless he’s an ice-sylum seeker.
Those drones would be nicked if they landed here in Ireland.
Too windy anyway
Jangles is correct, you need a much larger airframe and engine to withstand higher winds, the ones pictures wouldn’t handle even a strong breeze. The drones required to achieve this would be too large to operate effectively within an urban environment.
And they don’t have wind in America?
Sure they’re fulla wind
More likely TAXED …. FLYOVER TAX ….. USE OF AIRSPACE TAX ….. I think I’ll lie down now I’ve a droning in my head
Never mind parcels, when will a drone collect me at my house and drop me off at work?!
What is a robot and what is generally a machine is generally only outlined in Science-Fiction, these drones are simply automated machines and we’ve had automated machines for quite a while. Only to less technically minded people would the line between robot and machine might seem more defined as their only reference is from movies like Star Wars and iRobot.
The only time these technologies become questionable is when we achieve truly self aware AI, and as a software engineer I can tell you that’s a VERY theoretical practice and is, at best, a long way off from being applied to mobile machinery.
What is no more than an expensive self-flying remote control copter (without the remote control of course here) with GPS guidance and basic obstacle sensors is a far cry from self aware AI, but I will say this, it will be pretty cool seeing these things flying all over the place!
Nope.
Tip onward, Journal.ie, this article and subject is two months out of date. Try and keep up, boys and girls!
Try and realise its a column, not a news article, perhaps reading the column where it states this may help.
The US article on this was broadcast two months ago with Charlie Rose. It’s a filler. End of …
It’s an opinion piece. But when you read the headline and proceed straight to comments that tends to go above your head.
Me and my families would have 100′s of heart attacks if we saw these flying overhead in our American neighbourhood ..
Imagine how many of these drones would be vandalised and their pay load stolen if Amazon were to use them for deliveries?
Quadcopter.ie sell them… They made a fortune over Christmas…making a bigger fortune now on repairs with rookie pilots out Stephens day in 60mph winds.
Shades of the Jetsons! I await my first drone delivery from Amazon. But…what it you’re out when the drone calls. I can’t see it being practical just to leave deliveries at the front door.
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