HiRISE Studies the Dust on InSight
Click here for animation (.mp4, 19.3 MB)
NASA's InSight Mars lander acquires the same reddish-brown hue as the rest of the planet in a set of images captured by the agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) using its High-Resolution Imagine Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera.
This video shows images taken by HiRISE between Dec. 11, 2018, just a couple weeks after InSight landed on Mars, and Oct. 23, 2024. In the images, InSight often appears as a bright, blue dot due to its reflection of sunlight. A dark halo was scorched into the ground by the spacecraft's retrorocket thrusters; this halo fades away over time. Dark stripes that can be seen on the surface are tracks left by passing dust devils.
Figure A is the single HiRISE image taken on Oct. 23, 2024.
Monitoring the change in dust at the Martian surface helps scientists understand how quickly the surface changes at a given location over time. That's particularly helpful for ascertaining the age of meteoroid craters, which serve as time-keepers on surface: Understanding how quickly they're fading lets scientists estimate how long they've been there, and thus how old that particular surface is.
The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colorado. A division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL manages the MRO project and managed InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
The InSight mission was part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supported spacecraft operations for the mission.
A number of European partners, including France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument to NASA, with the principal investigator at IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris). Significant contributions for SEIS came from IPGP; the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany; the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland; Imperial College London and Oxford University in the United Kingdom; and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument, with significant contributions from the Space Research Center (CBK) of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika in Poland. Spain's Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) supplied the temperature and wind sensors.