Watch NASA engineers put a Mars lander's legs to the test
Sturdy legs are needed to absorb the impact of the heaviest spacecraft to ever touch down on the Red Planet.
Sturdy legs are needed to absorb the impact of the heaviest spacecraft to ever touch down on the Red Planet.
Space Exploration
Aug 10, 2023
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Astronaut Frank Rubio aboard the International Space Station collaborated with a small team of robots on Earth to accomplish a complex task—a first test of a new approach to combine human and robotic capabilities for our ...
Space Exploration
Jul 26, 2023
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After some four years probing Mars' interior, NASA's InSight lander will likely retire this summer as accumulated dust on its solar panels saps its power.
Space Exploration
May 22, 2022
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Covered in the red dust that sealed its fate, the NASA InSight lander is slowly shutting down, more than 250 million kilometers from home.
Space Exploration
May 17, 2022
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The team behind NASA's InSight Mars lander has come up with an innovative way to boost the spacecraft's energy at a time when its power levels have been falling. The lander's robotic arm trickled sand near one solar panel, ...
Space Exploration
Jun 3, 2021
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The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has announced on its website that the agency has plans to put a Transformable Lunar Robot on the moon. In their announcement, they note that the goal of the robot deployment is ...
NASA's InSight lander has detected two strong, clear quakes originating in a location of Mars called Cerberus Fossae—the same place where two strong quakes were seen earlier in the mission. The new quakes have magnitudes ...
Planetary Sciences
Apr 1, 2021
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NASA's InSight lander continues working to get its "mole"—a 16-inch-long (40-centimeter-long) pile driver and heat probe—deep below the surface of Mars. A camera on InSight's arm recently took images of the now partially ...
Space Exploration
Oct 19, 2020
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NASA's InSight lander has been using its robotic arm to help the heat probe known as the "mole" burrow into Mars. The mission is providing the first look at the Red Planet's deep interior to reveal details about the formation ...
Space Exploration
Jul 7, 2020
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NASA's InSight lander, which is on a mission to explore the deep interior of Mars, positioned its robotic arm this past weekend to assist the spacecraft's self-hammering heat probe. Known as "the mole," the probe has been ...
Space Exploration
Oct 3, 2019
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