NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) are giving up their attempts to get the HP³ drilling instrument of the Insight probe further into the soil of Mars. Even after HP³ was last pushed under the surface with the help of the robot arm from Insight, 500 hammer blows had not brought any noticeable progress last weekend.

The scientists are now giving themselves up because of this and will no longer try to hammer the measuring device deeper into the ground. It should now at least continue to measure the temperatures in this uppermost layer of the underground. “This planet is and will remain a difficult neighbor to research”, states the DLR.

Drilling instrument does not get into the ground Als Insight end 2018 landed on Mars, the NASA probe had, among other things, the HP³ (Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package) instrument from Germany on board. It looks like a big nail, has a built-in hammer and pulls a cable behind it that is equipped with temperature sensors. The HP³ should actually hammer itself at a depth of three to five meters and measure the temperature to within a thousandth of a degree Celsius. This would have made it possible to determine, among other things, how the interior of the red planet developed and whether it still has a hot, liquid core. But after the first hammer blows in March 2019, things soon got stuck and the researchers tried different ways to solve the unexpected problems.

After HP³ simply couldn’t penetrate the ground on its own, the scientists changed the procedure last year. They placed the Insight robot arm as a resistance behind HP³ to push it into the ground. In this way they managed to push HP³ so deep into the ground that it was completely covered with sand, but that was probably not more than an inch. Later they also filled the side cavities so that the instrument had enough resistance. Despite the careful preparation, the last 500 hammer blows once again failed to get the instrument into the ground, the DLR now explains. With this all possibilities are exhausted and the researchers give up.

“Experience gained” “The mole was based on the soil analyzes of NASA rovers like Spirit and Opportunity, “explains Troy Hudson from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But the underground at Insight’s landing site, “is completely different from anything we’ve seen before.” After all, we have gained a lot of experience that will help in future attempts to get below the surface of Mars, says Tilman Spohn from DLR.

Heike Rauer, also from DLR, adds that one is of course sad that after many years of planning, developing and constructing the instrument, not all components work as hoped. But “we will continue to try to elicit its secrets from Mars in order to find out whether there really was life there. The next experiments are already in development.”

(mho)