It's been a busy, busy month for all things space and science
Oh my. It’s been a big month in space exploration, with lots of exciting developments on a lot of different fronts. So, let’s get right to it.
Mars InSight Lander Touches Down
After a six-month journey from the Earth to Mars, NASA’s InSight lander touched down on Mars on November 26th. At this point, landing on Mars might seem like a routine thing, but it isn’t. InSight is just the 16th of 22 American missions to successfully make it to Mars.
(I’m not even going to talk about the number of failed Russian missions. They have a much worse track record than we do.)
Still, land it did, and it seems to have landed in an absolutely perfect spot: A nice, mostly level valley where it can do its thing. That thing? Well, the InSight lander is basically a robot geologist. Its main objective will be to study the interior of Mars. While it has several different instruments to do this, the big two are a seismometer, and the “Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package” (HP3) instrument.
The seismometer, of course, will listen for marsquakes. These will give us a better understanding of exactly what the innards of Mars are actually made of. The HP3 instrument, nicknamed, “The Mole,” is a thin rod that will be hammered into the surface of Mars. HP3 is long enough to go up to 5 meters (about 5.5 yards), into the ground.
As the full name suggests, HP3’s purpose is to measure how well (or not), heat actually flows through the ground on Mars. These two instruments, along with several others, should give us clues as to how similar internally Mars is to Earth, and maybe even help us work out what happened to its magnetic field and atmosphere.
Outta Sight!
Remember a couple years back when the Voyager 1 probe made it to interstellar space? Lots of people (including the folks at NASA) were wondering when Voyager 2 might finally make it past the influence of the Sun. (Both probes were headed in different directions, and we still don’t know the exact shape of the heliosphere, so all we could really do was wait.)
Well, it’s finally happened!
On November 5th, Voyager 2 officially left the Sun’s influence to become just the second object humans have managed to throw out into interstellar space.
Pet peeve tangent time. Lots of writers get it wrong when dealing with distances on this scale. The space between planets is “interplanetary” space. The InSight probe, for example, is an interplanetary probe. The space between stellar objects, i.e. “stars,” is “interstellar” space.
The Voyagers started as interplanetary probes, but now that they have moved into the void outside the influence of any stars, they are interstellar objects. The space between Galaxies is “intergalactic” space.
At this point, there are no intergalactic probes, and there probably won’t be in our lifetimes (possibly not even during the lifetime of our species!). In fact, the distance from here to intergalactic space is so vast, that even science fiction doesn’t deal with it very often. It’s just insanely far away.
If, other than pride, you wonder what the big deal is….eell, unlike Voyager 1, Voyager 2 has a fully functional plasma detector. So, it’s sending back data about the interstellar void that Voyager 1 simply can’t provide.
This is data that no living thing (as far as we know), has ever seen before and it could tell us a great deal about the universe we live in. Not bad for a probe whose primary mission ended almost 30 years ago!
And More To Come!
The Chinese have just put a lander in orbit around the moon. It will stay there for a couple more weeks before a January 3rd landing attempt on the far side of the moon. Assuming the landing is a success, the lander/rover will send data back to Earth using a satellite that was launched earlier this year and is now in orbit at the L2 (Lagrange 2) point.
From this point, the satellite, named “Queqiao,” has a view of both the Earth and the far side of the moon and can relay data between ground controllers and the lander. To my knowledge, this is the first attempted landing of a rover on the far side of the moon, so I can’t wait to see what they discover!
Steven W. Disbrow is the proprietor of “Improv Chattanooga” on the South Side of town. He also creates e-commerce systems and reads comic books when he’s not on stage acting like a fool.