Just watched the NASA tv coverage of the Insight landing. All went as planned, it's on the surface and broadcasting.
The two little cube sat relays that tagged along worked perfectly during descent to relay telemetry back to Earth tracking stations.
Yes great to NASA pushing on with unmanned planetary missions
As this spacecraft relies on 2 large solar arrays for power, do you know if it has the ability to retract , clean the panels of dust and debris and redeploy ? I’m sure there would some kind of contingency engineered into the design of the power system ?
Yes great to NASA pushing on with unmanned planetary missions
As this spacecraft relies on 2 large solar arrays for power, do you know if it has the ability to retract , clean the panels of dust and debris and redeploy ? I’m sure there would some kind of contingency engineered into the design of the power system ?
Not sure if it could be done but it's certainly not designed to retract the panels once they're unfurled. As experience with the MERs has shown, minimal dust accumulation on the panels combined with wind cleaning events should keep this lander going for at least it's 2 year primary mission.
Also not sure why they didn't show this image during the landing broadcast (you could see it on one of the controllers screens in the BG) but here's the first image, with dust cap still attached (as expected): https://mars.nasa.gov/raw_images/8/?site=insight
