Sparreboom on Mars

Sparreboom on Mars

The Mars lander InSight was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on 5 May 2018. After a six-month cruise, InSight landed on Mars on 26 November 2018. After about 30 days, it began taking measurements of the landscape on Mars and stopped on 15 December 2022.

Mars’ seismic activity, vibrations caused by quakes beneath the Martian surface, was one of the things they wanted to measure. For that, they used SEIS, the hemispherical sphere in the image below. The black object next to it, HP³, had to drill a 5-metre hole to measure the temperature in it. That depth was not reached because the drill encountered different soil properties than expected. In addition, RISE had to make precise location measurements to determine how much the north pole of Mars wobbles during its orbit around the sun. And all this during one Martian year, roughly two Earth years.

Apart from a lot of measuring instruments, InSight had something else special with it. Namely, two microchips containing the names of a total of 2.4 million people.

To be part of that, you could sign up with NASA. At least one Sparreboom did:

Well, a Sparreboom grows everywhere…You can check here (at the very bottom) if someone you know has signed up. Maybe yourself? Let us know!