News from the fourth planet...

INSIGHT: Okay, I'm going to stick a probe in you.

MARS: No. Don't want probe. Go 'way.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

This wouldn't happen if we had an alicorn princess to make the planet act reasonably.

[Stardust-pony]

Mars-chan don't touch

[Booster Spice]

All that CeraPykrete.

Weird how this material has been known for militery purposes for 70 years and theyre still confused when impacts bounce of dense armoured concrete equivalents?

Even dedicated shaped charges only go a couple metres through the stuff.

[Subocaji]

Little did NASA realize that they had inadvertently sent their "probe" to the opposite side of the of the face on Mars..OMG it's a thermometer never mind NASA knows exactly what they did and they should be ashamed😁

[Kris Overstreet]

5147434 (insert smug Starlight Glimmer emoji here)

[Super Trampoline]

5147452
So basically ice in the soil makes it way stronger?

[Booster Spice]

5147589

Ice plus Quartz plus cryogenic temperatures make it UBoat Pens Bomb resistant dense reinforced concrete.

I treat it at least the same as the local building materials where I live. You might think Tungsten Carbide masonry bits will do, but nooo. You Have to use Hammer Action as well. And thats with large flute bits to Archimedes the dust back out of the hole.

I mean, honestly? pitons into cryo ice surface? the slightest misalignment on impact and you really get a flip off. In fact, if you want a better idea, look at the Phoenix Lander. Blasted the loose soil away and was left with a slab of solid ice there under the rocket engine only 8 inches down. the material is psychotic, so like on Earth, keeps confusing me when we keep insisiting on building flimsy caves on the surface, when we can build resiliant caves under it.

[Misplaced Mage]

5147599
Makes one wonder how they'd get a probe down through potentially 25 kilometers of ice to reach the ocean of Europa, short of shipping a fully equipped, radiation-hardened, manned drilling platform a few hundred million kilometers to Jupiter. I know there's been discussion of using a mole heated by either decaying plutonium or something like a kilopower nuclear reactor to just melt its way through, but that assumes that there's nothing but water ice to deal with. And it'd be sloooooooow -- this on top of the multi-year trip just to get the lander to Europa.

Perhaps if funding for the manned mission were hidden in the U.S. budget as another experimental project to mine manganese nodules from the sea floor, this time backed by Elon Musk...

[M1_A4_Abrams]

Clearly NASA should have sent wine and a movie first before attemtipng penetration.

Not sorry!

[Super Trampoline]

5147698
I feel like straight ice is probably much easier to drill through? But 25 km! That's a lot!

[Kris Overstreet]

5147698 Well, remember that the Insight probe was meant to be self-driving- and NOT a drill. But it's pretty apparent that some huge assumptions were made about Martian soil that don't line up with reality.

[ShadowStar_IMHP]

“Something coming through the roof poppa”. “Well, Dzbark just push it back out”

Just something that popped into my mind. My guess is the sand in that area so fine that it keeps shifting back to fill any void the mole dug out.

[Misplaced Mage]

5147736
True, based on could be generously described as wishful thinking based on educated guesses from up-close regolith observations of less than 0.00000001% of the surface of Mars, never mind what's more than a few centimeters beneath it. They were bound to be surprised one way or another, unfortunately this time around the surprise was bad from an engineering perspective.

Next time (and I'm reasonably confident that there will be a next time for this sort of experiment), I'd be willing to bet that a lander-mounted drill, borer, or pile-driver will be used despite the mass penalty that helped contribute to the selection of the mole this time around.