Personnel supporting NASA's InSight mission to Mars load the crated InSight spacecraft into a C-17 cargo aircraft at Buckley Air Force Base, Denver, for shipment to Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The spacecraft, built in Colorado by Lockheed Martin Space, was shipped February 28, 2018, in preparation for launch from Vandenberg in May 2018.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin Space

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A truck carrying NASA's InSight spacecraft leaves Lockheed Martin Space, Denver, where the spacecraft was built and tested, on February 28, 2018. InSight was driven to Buckley Air Force Base, where it was loaded into a C-17 cargo aircraft and flown to Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. There, it will be prepared for a May launch.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin Space

Full image and caption

A C-17 cargo aircraft carrying NASA's InSight spacecraft flew from Buckley Air Force Base, Denver, to Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on February 28, 2018. The spacecraft was being shipped from Lockheed Martin Space, Denver, where InSight was built and tested. Its launch period opens May 5, 2018.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin Space

Full image and caption

NASA's InSight spacecraft has arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California to begin final preparations for a launch this May. The spacecraft was shipped from Lockheed Martin Space, Denver, today and arrived at Vandenberg at 3:49 p.m. PST (6:49 p.m. EST). The launch period for InSight opens May 5 and continues through June 8. InSight will be the first mission to look deep beneath the Martian surface, studying the planet's interior by listening for marsquakes and measuring the planet’s heat output. It will also be the first planetary spacecraft to launch from the West Coast.

"The Air Force C-17 crew from the 21st Airlift Squadron gave us a great ride," said Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager, from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Next time InSight travels as high and as fast, it will be about 23 seconds into its launch, on the way to Mars."
 

At the Astrotech payload processing facility at Vandenberg, InSight will soon be removed from its shipping container -- the first of several remaining milestones to prepare it for launch. Later next week, the spacecraft will begin functional testing to verify its state of health after the flight from Colorado. After that, the team will load updated flight software and perform a series of mission readiness tests. These tests involve the entire spacecraft flight system, the associated science instruments and the ground data system. 

"One of the most important activities before launch is to load the spacecraft with the fuel needed for the journey to Mars," said Hoffman. "After fuel loading, the spacecraft will undergo a spin-balance test to determine precisely the center of mass. This knowledge is needed to be sure the entry and descent into the Mars atmosphere goes as planned."

InSight will be carried into space aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V-401 rocket lifting off from Space Launch Complex 3E at Vandenberg Air Force Base. For a May 5 liftoff, the launch window opens at 4:05 a.m. PDT (7:05 a.m. EDT) and remains open through 6:05 a.m. PDT (9:05 a.m. EDT). 

InSight will use the seismic waves generated by marsquakes to map the deep interior of Mars. These waves travel through geologic materials at different speeds and reflect off boundaries, giving scientists a glimpse of the composition and structure of the planet's interior. They reflect the initial formation of the planet, and the resulting insights into how Mars formed will help us better understand how other rocky planets are created, including our own Earth.

JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The InSight spacecraft, including cruise stage and lander, was built and tested by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver. A number of European partners, including France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission.

Quelle: NASA

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Update: 3.03.2018

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InSight lander flown to California for final launch preps

NASA’s robotic InSight Mars lander arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California this week aboard a U.S. Air Force cargo plane, ready for final testing, fueling and launch aboard an Atlas 5 rocket May 5, two years later the originally planned.

Carried aboard an Air Force C-17 transport plane, the spacecraft touched down on Vandenberg’s runway Wednesday afternoon after a trip from Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado, near Lockheed Martin’s spacecraft manufacturing facility in Denver.

“The Air Force C-17 crew from the 21st Airlift Squadron gave us a great ride,” said Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Next time InSight travels as high and as fast, it will be about 23 seconds into its launch, on the way to Mars.”

Teams transferred InSight, which took the trip inside an environmentally-controlled container, to an Astrotech clean room on the base, where engineers unpacked the lander from its shipping box Thursday to begin several weeks of checkouts and tests.

InSight’s launch window May 5 opens at 4:05 a.m. PDT (7:05 a.m. EDT; 1105 GMT) and extends for two hours. The mission has until June 8 to launch and reach Mars for an automated landing Nov. 26.

The mission will be the first planetary probe to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The spacecraft was supposed to launch in March 2016, but problems sealing a vacuum enclosure containing one of the lander’s primary instruments, a seismometer, forced officials to postpone the mission. Mars launch opportunities come once every 26 months, when the planets are in the proper positions in the solar system, so the next chance to send InSight to the red planet is in May.

The seismometer sensors are now healthy, their enclosure sealed, and are ready for launch. The InSight spacecraft itself, along with a German-built heat probe sensor and the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, were all in position at Vandenberg for the March 2016 launch when NASA managers decided in December 2015 to keep the mission on the ground.

Officials flew the InSight spacecraft back to its Lockheed Martin factory after NASA’s decision, and placed the lander in storage until last year, when the redesigned seismometer package arrived from France. Technicians installed the seismometer on the lander, then put the craft through a series of thermal, vacuum and acoustic tests to ensure it will survive the journey to Mars.

“We really wrung out everything on the vehicle,” said Scott Daniels, Lockheed Martin’s assembly, test and launch operations manager for InSight. “This time around, we had all the flight components in, and we got a lot of good performance testing and environmental testing that gives us confidence that we’re ready to launch.”

InSight is already in its launch configuration, with the lander cocooned inside a heat shield and back shell that will protect it during the cruise to Mars, and then during entry into the Martian atmosphere.

Once ground crews place InSight on a rotation fixture in the clean room, they will begin testing the spacecraft to ensure it was undamaged during the trip from Colorado to California. Engineers will also upload a final version of InSight’s flight software program into the lander’s computer, Daniels said in an interview.

“Once we get it checked out, they’ll take the heat shield off of it again, which exposes the bottom of the spacecraft,” said Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “That will allow them to make the final connections that we need to make in order to run all the verification tests on the electronics to make sure everything is fine after shipment, and allow us access to fill the propellant tanks.”

Workers will load helium pressurant and hydrazine fuel into the spacecraft later this month, then engineers will ready InSight to meet its Atlas 5 booster, a process that includes encapsulating the probe inside the Atlas 5’s nose cone.

“We stay in the launch configuration,” Daniels said. “There’s really a limited number of things that we have access to and also a limited of number of things we’re really going test while we’re there. It’s pretty close to a ‘ship and shoot’ for a NASA mission.”

“We integrate with the payload adapter, do the final heat shield installation, close out, do the encapsulation, and drive out to the pad,” Daniels said.

The Atlas 5 rocket originally assigned to launch InSight, designated AV-062, instead launched with the WorldView 4 Earth-imaging satellite in November 2016. A different Atlas 5 vehicle, numbered AV-078, is currently at Vandenberg, where it could be stacked on the launch mount at Space Launch Complex 3-East as soon as this weekend.

Plans to transfer the Atlas 5’s first stage to the Vandenberg launch pad Friday were thwarted by heavy rainfall at the West Coast launch base.

Once the first stage is lifted vertical inside the launch pad’s mobile service gantry, ULA’s team will hoist a Centaur upper stage atop the rocket. After a series of rocket tests, InSight will join the Atlas 5 at the launch pad in mid-April.

InSight will launch on the lightest version of the Atlas 5 family — known as the “401” configuration — with no solid rocket boosters and a four-meter (13-foot) diameter payload fairing.

InSight could launch from Florida or California, but ULA and NASA agreed to launch InSight from Vandenberg to reduce the Atlas 5 team’s workload at Cape Canaveral, where up to a half-dozen flights are planned this year. InSight is the only Atlas 5 mission set for launch from Vandenberg in 2018.

Lockheed Martin built the InSight lander on the design of the Phoenix probe, which touched down on Mars in 2008. Phoenix launched from Cape Canaveral in 2007 on a smaller Delta 2 rocket, a launcher set for retirement later this year, and InSight’s mass at launch is well below the maximum interplanetary lift capability of even the lightest Atlas 5 configuration.

That means InSight does not require the extra boost of energy a rocket would obtain from the Earth’s rotation by launching to the east from Cape Canaveral. The Atlas 5 launching InSight will instead head south over the Pacific Ocean from Vandenberg, which is located around 140 miles (225 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles.

Two CubeSats developed at JPL will accompany InSight on the launch. Once they arrive near Mars, the CubeSats will relay telemetry from InSight back to Earth as the probe descends through the Martian atmosphere.

But the experimental nano-probes are secondary to InSight’s mission, and the lander’s success will not depend on the CubeSats.

InSight will touch down at Elysium Planitia, a broad plain just north of the Martian equator, and use a robotic arm to place its seismic enclosure on the Martian surface to listen for quakes. The lander’s heat probe will burrow to a depth of around 16 feet, or 5 meters, to measure the amount of heat escaping the planet’s interior.

The seismometer instrument will be able to measure ground movements as small as half the radius of a hydrogen atom, NASA said, to sense minor shaking that may originate deep inside Mars. No mission has made a confirmed detection of “marsquakes” before, but instrumentation left behind by the Apollo astronauts discovered such tremors on the moon.

Scientists want to know about the structure of Mars’ interior, and they say InSight’s findings will help their understanding of how rocky planets, including Earth, formed in the early solar system.

NASA officials were uncomfortable launching InSight with a faulty seismometer instrument because the sensor package’s measurements are central to the mission’s overall objectives.

CNES, the French space agency, is responsible for providing the seismic instrument.

The InSight mission’s budget from NASA was originally $675 million, but the two-year delay will push the cost above $800 million. Those figures do not include funding from CNES and DLR, the German space agency, for InSight’s two main instruments.

The cost of the delay was primarily borne by NASA, but CNES was also on the hook for some of the instrument rework, officials said.

In an interview Thursday with Spaceflight Now, Banerdt said U.S. and French engineers jointly redesigned the thermal vacuum enclosure containing the seismic sensors.

“The basic structure of it is the same as it was before, but we looked at all the connections, all the welds, everything in the vacuum container that might possibly be a problem, beefed it up, made it more robust in just about every way that we could, and even put some materials on the inside that would absorb gases, mostly for gases that would come off things like adhesives — outgassing on the inside of the container — but also would be able to somewhat mitigate a small leak on Mars as well,” he said.

The enclosure passed a vacuum leak check last year before the seismometer team shipped the instrument to the United States from France.

“We went and tested the living bejesus out of it, in every way that we would,” Banerdt said. “And it passed all our tests with flying colors before we even put the seismometers inside one. We had a qualification model that was identical to what we were going to use for flight and tested it to much more extreme conditions than the flight model will ever see, and had absolutely no problems. We all believe that we’ve got a really, really solid vacuum enclosure for the seismometer.”

Scientists also used the two-year delay to upgrade the seismic package, and make the instrument more sensitive to quakes on Mars.

“We went back and did a little bit of work on the seismometer sensors themselves — the so-called VBBs, or Very Broadband Sensors — and beefed them up a little bit and tweaked their performance based on some of the testing that we did for the 2016 launch opportunity,” Banerdt said. “We were able to just change a few components in the electronics to get about a factor of two-and-a-half better performance out of the seismometers.

“We really did not want to slip this these two years, but I think we took really good advantage of the opportunity that we had in order to make the whole system more reliable and better performing,” he said.

Quelle: SN

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Update: 14.03.2018

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I FLEW WITH THE NEXT NASA SPACECRAFT THAT WILL LAND ON MARS

How to get a lander from Colorado to California

Inside a bright, cavernous room, a giant white metal box is rising toward the ceiling. A cable and pulley system tugs the box upward, and it ascends at just an inch a minute.

I’m staring at this box along with 30 or so other people, all of whom are wearing white. No, not wearing white — covered in white. Every person sports a white cloth onesie. No hands or shoes can be seen; all are shrouded in gloves and booties. Even hair doesn’t exist here. Every head is veiled in more white cloth. The only exposed skin I can see are the small slivers of flesh around each individual’s eyes. Mouths must be hidden, too.

I’m wearing the same odd outfit. I had to put it on before I was allowed in here — standard procedure when you enter a spacecraft clean room. And the clothing is extra important today since the box we’re all staring at isn’t just a box. It’s a shipping container. The clean room crew is lifting off the top of the container to reveal the box’s precious cargo: NASA’s next Mars lander.

The spacecraft is InSight, and if everything goes as planned, it will be out of this box and sitting on Mars by the end of the year. NASA plans to launch the vehicle in May; it will land in November. When InSight does take off, NASA wants very few Earth germs on the spacecraft. Our planet’s microbes are resilient; many can survive the harsh trip through space, and NASA doesn’t want to risk contaminating Mars with some big, bad Earth bug. That would make it difficult for future Mars missions to know if there is truly indigenous life on the Red Planet — or if we just put it there ourselves.

Hence, the funny outfits: we have to keep all our resident microbes on our skin and clothes to ourselves.

Unlike NASA’s Curiosity rover, InSight is a lander. That means it won’t be roaming around on the planet. It’s meant to stay in one spot on the surface, where it will measure Mars’ quakes. Yes, just like Earth, Mars might have quakes, though they’re different. Earthquakes are caused by shifts in tectonic plates on our planet, whereas “Marsquakes” are likely fueled by magma moving under the surface or the vibrations of cracks in the crust. InSight is designed to detect these quakes and use the wobbles to figure out what Mars is made of.

InSight will be the first interplanetary mission to ever take off from the West Coast. So far, every US mission to another planet or distant moon in our Solar System has launched from Florida. Rockets that fly to the east from Florida get an extra speed boost, but InSight is fairly small It doesn’t need the boost as much as heavier spacecraft do. And since Florida is a busy place for rockets launches, NASA plans to launch this vehicle on May 5th, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California, which is usually pretty open. That’s where we are now: a clean room on the base only a few miles from where InSight will launch. I’ve just spent the last day with Lockheed Martin — InSight’s manufacturer — and the US Air Force getting InSight over here.

How exactly does one move a spacecraft across the country, you might ask? Very carefully — and with a big plane.

Lockheed Martin built the majority of InSight at the company’s facility in Littleton, Colorado. Most of the manufacturing was completed three years ago. NASA originally hoped to launch InSight in May 2016, but one of the spacecraft’s instruments wasn’t working. In order to be sensitive to Marsquakes, InSight’s seismometer has to be sealed inside a vacuum chamber, and back in 2015, NASA found that this chamber was leaking. So the mission was pushed to 2018 — the next time when Earth and Mars line up on their orbits — to allow engineers time to fix the instrument.

So Lockheed Martin has actually moved InSight once before. The company transported the lander after a big snowstorm in mid-December 2015, before learning that the mission was delayed and that the spacecraft would need to go back to Colorado. Fortunately, the weather in Littleton is much nicer for our trip to Vandenberg. There’s barely a cloud in the sky, and it’s a nice 28 degrees Fahrenheit, which feels warmer than it does on the coasts. The air is super dry, and with the Sun shining, it all makes for a beautiful crisp day.

Our itinerary begins at Lockheed’s Littleton facility. From there, we’ll caravan in buses to Buckley Air Force Base. I’m traveling with a few members of the InSight team from Lockheed and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well the crew tasked with handling the spacecraft. InSight, sealed tight in its white shipping box, will follow behind us, pulled by a semi truck. The container takes up a couple of lanes on the highway, so Lockheed has snagged a sheriff’s escort to drive in front of and behind the lander. Once we get to the base, the crew will load up the container on an enormous cargo plane provided by the Air Force, called a C-17. And when that’s done, we’ll head out to California with the spacecraft.

It’s going to be a long day since InSight can’t move very fast. Inside its box, the lander is surrounded by a large metal cage — referred to as the “birdcage” — that keeps it in place. But jostling in transit isn’t Lockheed’s biggest worry; the real struggle is keeping InSight at the right temperature and humidity level. If the temperature inside the shipping container gets too cold and the level of moisture gets too high, condensation might start to form on the spacecraft, like how dew forms on grass in the morning. But if water starts to form on InSight, the moisture could damage the vehicle and put the entire mission in jeopardy.

Lockheed is using an environmental control system to keep the temperature steady, so InSight’s shipping container has tubes sprouting from its back, attached to a heater and gas tanks. And if things start to get too moist inside the box, the company can purge the air with nitrogen gas. Nitrogen doesn’t hold moisture, so adding the gas to the box pushes out wetter air and keeps things dry. The only problem is that the tanks and heating system have to be disconnected in order to load InSight onto the plane.

“When we’re loading it on the plane, there’s not much we can do to keep the temperature warm,” Scott Daniels, the assembly, test, and launch operations manager of InSight for Lockheed, tells me. “So the temperature can start to go down in the spacecraft when we’re going on.” Daniels says he isn’t too worried since the weather is being cooperative today, and the crew will constantly monitor temperature during the load.

We all file into our buses at about 8AM and travel an hour to Buckley. Once there, Daniels gets a text that one of the panels sporting the InSight logo has fallen off the side of the container en route. Its velcro came loose — not a big deal, just a change of aesthetic. If it’s the only hiccup today, the team will be happy.

We step out of the buses, and in front of us is the C-17, a truly massive aircraft with four huge engines attached to its wings. We all mill around the tarmac for a bit, while a couple of F-16 fighter jets take off on the runway next to us. Eventually, InSight arrives, and it’s time to get this box on the plane.

It takes about five hours to lift the container off the truck with a forklift and then drag it into the cargo bay of the plane with cables. Every move has to be precise. The box inches forward toward the plane, and the move is frequently stopped so that someone can adjust the wheels of the container. When the box reaches the plane’s on-ramp at last, small metal inclines are placed in front of the wheels to help the box get over the hump of the ramp smoothly. Gary Napier, the representative for Lockheed who has been escorting me, tells me that those little inclines are made just for this operation. I silently wonder how much they cost.

Dozens of people handle the spacecraft, while the rest of the onlookers stand around the plane. One of them is William “Bruce” Banerdt, the principal investigator of the InSight mission. If the science of InSight were a movie, he’d be the director. I ask him how it feels watching his lander — a design that he has been working on for the last decade — get loaded into the belly of a C-17. “I feel nervous all the time,” he says, adding that “one little slip now, we just don’t have time to recover from it.”

Around 3PM, it’s finally time to fly. I walk up the staircase to the plane’s cargo bay. The interior looks just like the military planes do in the movies, though less polished. Tubes and machinery I don’t recognize line the walls. Everyone sits in metal chairs attached to the hull. There aren’t very many windows. A set of stairs is located at the front of the plane, leading to the cockpit. I ask a media relations officer if I can go up. She says I can ride in the cockpit for takeoff if I want. Um, of course I do.

I’m strapped into my seat, but I’m still thrown back against the chair when we zoom down the runway. It’s truly a stunning view, watching Colorado’s mountains grow smaller from the cockpit’s windows. I ask the pilot what it’s like to fly this plane. He says it takes him all over the world. Last week, he was in Africa dropping off military personnel. Tomorrow, he’ll be transporting another spacecraft to Florida — though its identity is a secret.

Two hours later, we touch down in California and step off the plane. A crowd of Air Force personnel, Lockheed employees, and NASA engineers are there to greet us. I’m asked if I want to stick around to see the crew unload InSight off the plane. I tell them I’ll just imagine the morning’s events in reverse. What I’m really looking forward to is the next day, when the crew takes InSight out of its box, and I can finally see the lander up close.

After spending the night in the nearby town of Lompoc (pronounced “Lom Poke,” as I’m frequently told), I head back to Vandenberg Air Force Base. Lockheed has a clean room facility on the base called Astrotech, where its spacecraft are processed before launch. That’s where InSight will stay for the next couple of months. Not only do I have to suit up to go inside, but I have to pass through a room that douses me in a clean air shower beforehand to blow off all the particles on me.

Once the top of the shipping container is removed, InSight is at last exposed in all its glory. Well, sort of glory: it’s upside down, bundled up underneath a big shield. That’s how it’s going to launch on the rocket: with its legs pointed up, or toward Mars. During the descent to the surface, the shield will protect the lander from heating up before InSight deploys its parachutes to slow its fall. Landing on Mars is notoriously difficult; the planet’s atmosphere is very thin, providing little cushion for incoming spacecraft.

Seeing the lander outside its box, I have an overwhelming urge to touch it. Would I be tackled? Can they arrest me? Plus, how would they decontaminate the Loren germs off of InSight? Perhaps they would launch anyway, and my microbes would make it all the way to Mars. I don’t touch the spacecraft.

After taking the necessary selfies with InSight, I’m forced to say goodbye to the spacecraft, but I know I’ll see this little lander again soon. I’ll be watching when it launches on that Atlas V in just a few months. It’s funny the extremes that this spacecraft gets to experience during its lifetime. For most of its time on Earth, InSight is treated so delicately, like a porcelain doll that is transported with utmost care. All in the service of strapping it onto a missile and shooting it into space at 10,000 miles per hour.

And if its landing goes well — or even if it doesn’t — then Insight will never travel anywhere else again.

Quelle: The Verge