Naturally, the sounds of Mars have already been remixed: check out Andrew Huang’s take on InSight’s minor chord.

InSight also taken lots of pictures of the surroundings, getting the first good self-portrait and 360-degree panorama. As he has done for Curiosity, image artist Andrew Bodrov produced a really cool 360-degree VR panorama for Insight. You can check this out in the browser, but it’s especially cool using VR specs, even just Google Cardboard. As far as I’m concerned, the greatest thing about this panorama is that we can see the whole spacecraft. When Curiosity takes panoramas, they almost never include the rover deck. In this immersive panorama, we can see the lander in full color, situated in its landing site.

Andrew Bodrov’s is not the only virtual reality panorama of the InSight lander available. Another is available in SteamVR.

Working in the Workspace

The first days of any lander mission involve scoping out the landing site and getting your bearings. I posted last week about the first Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE images of the landing site, which have provided a bird’s eye view. The 360-degree panorama I shared above shows the view from the ground. I asked Bruce what he sees with his geologist’s eye in this landscape. His response: “A flat, featureless plain. Rocks are few and far between.” From orbit, “you can see that there are a lot of very subtle craters around. Some of them are right next to us, but we can’t even see them in our images very well. It’s a plain, it’s old, it’s been battered by craters for billions of years, it’s pretty well smoothed out. The exact place where we put our lander is in the middle of just a little sandy bowl.”

The “sandy bowl” they landed in is a remarkable stroke of luck. It’s pretty flat and smooth, sloping only about 2 or 3 degrees. It lacks large rocks. It’s easy material for the heat probe to penetrate. The bowl is a small crater, so that sandy fill probably only extends about a meter or two below the lander. Beneath that is regolith. Beneath the regolith is rock -- still all busted up and fractured from impacts, but otherwise relatively in place. I asked Bruce how deep the regolith goes, and he estimated 8 to 12 meters based on what you can see in orbital data. When you look at craters across the region, you can see that some craters have no blocks in their ejecta, and some do. The craters with blocks tend to be larger than 100 meters or so. We know from crater formation studies that a crater excavates material down to about a tenth its diameter to make its ejecta, so if craters have to be bigger than 100 meters across to throw big blocks out, that means the depth to the big blocks is roughly 10 meters. Here’s a little cartoon summary of what we think the ground looks like under InSight: