LOS ANGELES, Oct. 4 (Xinhua) -- NASA's InSight lander on Mars is making new efforts to use its robotic arm to get the mission's heat flow probe, or "mole," digging again, said a latest release of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
The probe has been unable to dig more than about 35 centimeters since it began burying itself into the ground on Feb. 28, 2019.
The mission team plans to get InSight's robotic arm to use its scoop to pin the spacecraft's heat probe against the wall of its hole.
"We're going to try pressing the side of the scoop against the mole, pinning it to the wall of its hole," said InSight Deputy Principal Investigator Sue Smrekar of JPL. "This might increase friction enough to keep it moving forward when mole hammering resumes."
Whether the extra pressure on the mole will compensate for the unique soil remains unknown.
Designed to burrow as much as 5 meters underground to record the amount of heat escaping from the Red Planet's interior, the mole needs friction from surrounding soil in order to dig, said JPL.
Without it, recoil from the self-hammering action causes it to simply bounce in place, which is what the mission team suspects is happening now.
Besides pinning, the team is also testing a technique to use the scoop to scrap soil into the hole rather than try to compress it.
