Beginning Tuesday, February 19, 2019, NASA’s InSight lander will provide a daily report of atmospheric weather conditions on Mars. This tool, developed by researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Cornell University and Spain’s Centro de Astrobiologia, includes stats on temperature, wind and air pressure recorded by the lander.
An artist’s impression of the InSight lander on Mars. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
Through a package of sensors called the Auxiliary Payload Subsystem (APSS), InSight will provide more around-the-clock weather information than any previous mission to the Martian surface.
The lander records these data during each second of every sol (a Martian day) and sends it to Earth on a daily basis. InSight is designed to continue that operation for at least the next two Earth years, allowing it to study seasonal changes as well.
“It gives you the sense of visiting an alien place. Mars has familiar atmospheric phenomena that are still quite different than those on Earth,” said Cornell University’s Dr. Don Banfield.
Constantly collecting weather data allows the InSight team members to detect sources of ‘noise’ that could influence readings from the lander’s two primary instruments: the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) and the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe (HP3). Both are affected by Mars’ extreme temperature swings.
SEIS is sensitive to air pressure changes and wind, which create movements that could mask actual marsquakes.
“APSS will help us filter out environmental noise in the seismic data and know when we’re seeing a marsquake and when we aren’t. By operating continuously, we’ll also see a more detailed view of the weather than most surface missions, which usually collect data only intermittently throughout a sol,” Dr. Banfield said.
APSS includes an air pressure sensor inside the lander and two air temperature and wind sensors on the lander’s deck.
Under the edge of the deck is a magnetometer, which will measure changes in the local magnetic field that could also influence SEIS. It is the first magnetometer ever placed on the surface of another planet.
Two weather sensors, called the Temperature and Wind for InSight (TWINS), will be used to tell the team when strong winds could interfere with small seismic signals. But it could also be used, along with InSight’s cameras, to study how much dust and sand blow around.
APSS will also help the researchers learn about dust devils that have left streaks on the planet’s surface.
Dust devils are essentially low-pressure whirlwinds, so InSight’s air pressure sensor can detect when one is near. It’s highly sensitive — 10 times more so than equipment on the Viking and Pathfinder landers — enabling the team to study dust devils from hundreds of feet (dozens of meters) away.
“Our data has already shown there are a lot of dust devils at our location. Having such a sensitive pressure sensor lets us see more of them passing by,” Dr. Banfield said.
