HP3 'Mole' en route to the Red Planet - NASA InSight probe launched with DLR experiment on board

DLR German Aerospace Center
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HP3 'Mole' en route to the Red Planet - NASA InSight probe launched with DLR experiment on board


Over the course of a few months, the HP3 'Mole' developed by the German Aerospace Centre (Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt, DLR) will burrow up to five metres deep into the Red Planet to explore its inner structure. This will be the first time that a fully automatic self-hammering probe of this sort has been used. The experiment is part of the NASA InSight mission to Mars, which launched on 5 May 2018. At 13:05 CEST (04:05 local time), an Atlas 401 rocket took off from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California carrying the probe on board. The geophysical observatory is set to land just north of the Martian equator, on the Elysium Planitia plain, on 26 November 2018, having travelled for half a year, covering almost 500 million kilometres. There the small HP3 penetrometer will hammer into the Martian surface. It will remain there for about two years, providing data about the temperature gradient in the subsurface. Scientists want to understand how the interior of Mars developed, whether it still has a hot, liquid core, and what makes the Earth so special in comparison.


Full article: http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-27218/year-all/#/gallery/30487


Detailed information on InSight and the HP3 experiment are available in this background article: http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-27154/year-all/#/gallery/30418

And on DLR's dedicated mission site: http://www.dlr.de/en/insight

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