Safely on Mars, InSight unfolds its arrays and snaps some pics by Staff Writers Washington (AFP) Nov 29, 2018 After safely landing on Mars following its nearly seven month journey, NASA has released the first pictures taken by its InSight spacecraft, which has opened it solar arrays to charge batteries. The $993 million lander, which landed on Monday and appears to be in good shape, will soon begin unfolding its robotic arm and deploying its quake-sensors on the Martian surface. NASA engineers are planning to begin work with its robotic arm soon, but are proceeding with caution. The arm has five mechanical fingers to help it lift out and place its two instruments on Martian soil in the coming few months. "Slowly releasing all my pent-up tension, starting with loosening my grapple, as these before-and-after pics show," said the NASAInSight Twitter account. "Until I'm ready to stretch my arm out, my camera angles will be the same." InSight is equipped with two full-color cameras and has already sent back six shots since touching down. The waist-high spacecraft will stay in place for the two-year duration of its mission. NASA has not said anything about the condition of the other instruments on board, which include a French-made seismometer to study Marsquakes and a German self-hammering mole to measure heat's escape from the planet. NASA did say its solar arrays have deployed, which is good news since the lander runs on solar energy. In Paris, the French space agency CERN said everything seems fine for the moment, and that it is up to NASA to communicate with the SEIS quake-sensing instrument.
SSTL releases first images from S-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite, NovaSAR-1 Guildford, UK (SPX) Nov 26, 2018 Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) has released the first Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images taken from orbit by NovaSAR-1, a technology demonstration mission launched into a 580km sun-synchronous orbit on 16 September 2018. The S-Band SAR images released have been acquired using the satellite's stripmap mode at 6 metre resolution and are 20km wide by 87km long. They were taken over Sydney Harbour and Cairo and can be viewed and downloaded at the bottom of this page. Sam Gyimah, the U ... read more
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